... Lobby crew!

FOSS finally getting general public mindshare. Finally!

I can't find the citation for it, but in at least one case, part of the reported allocation of water for datacenters was due to the water consumed during construction. I would consider this kind of consumption legit if called out as a temporary usage of water, but FUD if just assumed as part of the overall calculation of ongoing water demand.

As for creating/destroying water:

https://www.fwpcoa.org/content...

"Air cooling (water-free): Many smaller or older data centers rely on air conditioning and chilled air circulation to remove heat. These use mechanical chillers or heat exchangers and do not consume water for cooling (aside from minimal water for humidification). Air cooling is common in cooler climates or where water is scarce, but it can require more electricity to run compressors or fans.
Evaporative cooling (open-loop): A majority of large, modern data centers use water-based cooling for better energy efficiency. This often involves cooling towers or evaporative chillers: warm water absorbs heat from servers and is then cooled by evaporation in a tower. As water evaporates into the air, it carries away heat â" dramatically cutting the electrical power needed for cooling. The trade-off is high water consumption. Most big data centers today use some form of evaporative cooling because itâ(TM)s energy-efficient, especially in hot climates, but it directly uses water (often drawn from municipal supply).
Closed-loop water cooling: In closed-loop systems, water circulates in sealed pipes or coils that cool the servers without directly exposing water to air. Because the water isnâ(TM)t evaporated to the environment, losses are minimal â" itâ(TM)s mostly the same water recirculating (with some makeup water added occasionally). These systems can include water-cooled heat exchangers or liquid-to-liquid cooling loops. Closed-loop cooling can reduce freshwater use by up to 70% compared to traditional open evaporative methods. The downside is higher cost and complexity, but they are far more water-efficient since water isnâ(TM)t âoeburned offâ into the air."

"However, a growing number of data centers are now shifting to recycled water. Tech giants have begun partnering with utilities to use treated wastewater (effluent) for cooling instead of fresh drinking water. For instance, Google uses reclaimed or non-potable water at over 25% of its data center campuses (one notable example is its Douglas County, Georgia data center, which runs on recycled municipal wastewater). Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in 2023 that 20 of its data centers are cooling with purified wastewater instead of potable water. After cycling through the cooling system, this water is sent back to the treatment plant to be cleaned and reused again. These initiatives leave more drinking-quality water for the community and exemplify the industryâ(TM)s trend toward âoestrategic water sourcing.â Still, as of today, reclaimed water use is the exception. Most data centers worldwide are still using fresh water for cooling, although this is slowly changing with new projects and local regulations."

So evaporative cooling "destroys" water. And using treated wastewater (pure enough to use for datacenter usage and probably irrigation, but still too ick for some people to drink directly - aka toilet to tap), if part of their investments were to purify even more water than the municipality was already processing, combined with closed loop usage could be considered "creating" water.

Your guess is as good as mine though, it all sounds like marketing hype in an attempt to combat FUD.

If it was a micrometeorite pinhole that might be good idea.

If it's a crack in a weld or in the metal itself you just ruined any chance of finding it. Then the crack will grow undetected until a large section departs into space.

Sort of like that Boeing did over Hawaii several years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So my house has EV and gas vehicles, and by far taking the gas vehicle to a gas station is way more annoying than plugging it in at home. Not to mention the maintenance (oil change? nope air filter change? nope brakes? just like hybrids the brakes barely get used). No random surprises like "oh great, some fluid on the ground, smoke is coming out the exhaust.

The battery is the big one, and the tendency to be heavier means faster tire wear, but the plugging in for a lot of people is a *plus* not a minus. Meanwhile the gas car has a few hundred here, a couple thousand there, and by the time I might have to replace the battery, I am pretty sure I have racked up equivalent costs over a much more annoying series of repairs and maintenance.

Tip, as soon as you say "copilot says", no one will take you seriously.

Yes, an *engine* can last a while, but that's far from the full picture.

Headgasket will likely not last that long, and while *technically* the engine "lasts" through that repair, that was an expensive repair.

Timing belt won't last that long, and that's an expensive maintenance item.

The transmissions for ICE wear more than EV, and those tend to have a relatively shorter life than cited, and that also is pretty pricey.

Further ignores things like oil changes constantly incurring expenses. Brakes on EVs and hybrids last way longer. If you can charge at home, your fuel savings are huge (public charging, maybe not so much).

Yes, when the battery goes, it will be expensive, but in that same time you probably have otherwise accumulated a comparable cumulative maintenance and repair bill for petrol-exclusive issues.

The word "capitalism" wasn't coined until much later. That means two things: One, it doesn't uphold capitalism and Two, it doesn't disparage it. What is in the Constitution is fundamental rights. Capitalism is a consequence of individuals exercising those rights, up to the point where it infringes on the rights of others. Recognizing that is one of the things that made Theodore Roosevelt a great president. There is nothing un-American about wanting to reign in capitalism, but there is something decidedly un-American about wanting to destroy it wholesale, since as mentioned previously it arises from the exercise of natural rights. This is the much-hated nuance, particularly despised by the left, who seek to abolish capitalism; but also some on the right who have an agenda to give free reign to robber-barons and undo the works of T.R. and others.

The DDoS method of problems solving is the only way to beat multiple PaC adventure games without a walkthough.

As they said, 8x code output is a flawed metric. By volume they are getting in.

One could even reasonably argue that they tend to be good at catching critical little details that are difficult for humans, like the consequences of a shallow copy buried in a sea of code creating a security disaster. A "needle in a haystack" scenario, where AI does comparatively well with the relentless attention span.

But in other ways, they are verbose messes, and will toss a whole lot of pull requests. Each of those pull requests may be a lot more volume than needed. For example, I got a CodeGen pull request for "close a gap between two elements after updating the UI framework to new version". Yes, real issue, and.. well, the referenced gap *did* close, but with a lot of dubious side effects. The issue called for a single CSS rule to be tweaked. It instead was hundreds of lines of CSS, sometimes verbatim repeated 4 times (the originator said he had to ask the prompt multiple times because it failed the first few times, it seemed Claude thought maybe adding the same rules it already added might have helped). Others might have just run the code saw the gap closed and accepted it, despite the baggage of 99% of the lines changed having no particular intent behind it.

This is in a normal where a lot of developers think even simple things need to be complex. Hello world needs to run in Azure Pipelines using Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible spawning at least 6 microservices. They think they need all of that and yet it's unmanageably convoluted, so the AI kind of lets them have all that superfluous complexity without actually managing it.

Thanks to work, I'm using it all the time.

It is true that even opus 4.8 cannot always bring a mundane code to life credibly. It can depending on what we are taking about, but the sorts of things it fails at are well short of the complexity of what it would mean to rewrite itself in any credible way.

More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.

This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.

It's greed, pure and simple.

Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.

... big thing. I don't think anybody has anything against any vehicle, tractor or other, or anything at all stuffed to the brim with useful electronics. (emphasis on useful) The problem is when that technology is proprietary, disfunctional on purpose and designed to be extortive. That farmers are sick and tired of that I can see clearly.

One big part of the problem also is that farmers are locked into their business harder than other people, more prone to corporate extractive and extortive business pratictices and they are likely not the type to have the free time to deal with these practices in other ways.

Setting up a non-profit and/or publicly shared business to offer hardware designs that counter these problems are a likely candidate for some use- and helpful businesses. I expect this to be the next big area where the FOSS concept catches on.

Quibble: TRI-fecta meaning that one party controls all 3 branches: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial (as with the current Republican control of the federal government). The Legislative may be a bicameral branch (having 2 parts), but it is still only 1 of the 3 branches.

They are finding a plateau with where the LLMs can go and could use the narrative of a "pause" to explain why capabilities are going to iterate in a more 'evolutionary' way instead of the revolutionary way folks are expecting.

There isn't to my knowledge a mechanism for the models to "self-improve", whatever one may think, at least the output doesn't have access to change the model in any way. The narrative of "oops the AI started evolving itself on accident" doesn't have a way to happen.

Considering that even the vaunted Opus 4.8 can't always develop mundane traditional software beginning, it's hard to imagine it could rework the model itself even if it had such access.

"quality discussion"

I agree. I just don't find reddit to be that. It's all very confident echo chambers.