An AI data center can replace a legion of human workers. So the heat emissions can be offset if those humans cease to exist.

A human operates at anywhere from 75-150W of energy. At 150W, a MW of energy is 6666 people. A rack in a datacenter right now consumes around 5-15kW, so a megawatt is around 100 racks.

AI datacenters are attempting to scale that up to 100kW per rack.

And none of that includes cooling and ancillary - this is just pure compute power consumption.

Start a new site called oldiefans

You only think that's not political because you're confusing centrists with leftists.

No, it's because of all the idiotic enablers. We could just solve the problem by walking into the halls of power en masse and removing them but you can only get that kind of energy from total fucking clowns who want anarchy, and not the good kind that doesn't exist (as it leads naturally to feudalism) but the bad kind with only chaos.

Web apps make at least some sense when you are delivering the exact same app via the web and as a local application. But Microsoft isn't doing that, so they make none...

Once again, Jack Tramiel gets no credit despite pushing computers into more hands than anyone else...

(Yes, not an engineer, but neither was Jobs. Jobs was always management and marketing, whatever his background might have been.)

I think the reality is that multiple people turned a hobby into a market and phenomenon. The reason Jobs gets so much focus is, I'm guessing:

1. While like Tramiel, Sinclair, Chris Curry/Hermann Hauser, and the largely forgotten names behind the TRS-80, he pushed for home computers to go to a wider audience than just electrical engineers, he charged more and aimed at the upper middle classes, from where our decision makers and journalists come from.

2. He was one of the few people with power to recognize the importance of the GUI work Xerox was doing and had Apple invest in that and produce the first computer aimed at the audience I just mentioned that had a WIMP interface.

3. He didn't leave.
  - Sinclair quit computing after the Z88.
  - Tramiel was fired from Commodore for dumb stupid reasons, was up against heavy competition from his old employer at Atari, and eventually wound down the latter not seeing it as having a future (and, to be honest, being at retirement age anyway.) As a result most Millennials and younger people have never heard of him. (If you're reading this and haven't, go read about him, he's a fascinating person. Engineers loved him. Marketers admired him. And people in business with him - dealerships, suppliers, etc - hated him...)
- The Acorn people faded out of view being kicked around upper management at Olivetti and then founding other interesting companies which, alas, was at a time the entire computing establishment had decided that only IBM PC clones mattered. Their relevance disappeared.
- Anyone know the TRS-80 people? Regardless, Radio Shack was more a traditional corporation anyway, if there was a Mr/Ms TRS-80, they didn't have much influence once Radio Shack hitched to the IBM PC clone thing.

So that left Jobs who came back to a still-active still-not-bankrupt still-selling-non-PCs Apple. And that gave him a far bigger boost in the public eye than those who had effectively left the industry because their companies could no longer operate doing anything interesting in the IBM PC clone world.

Jobs was not as big a figure pre-comeback. I knew of him, I remember reading the reports of him being fired from Apple in Personal Computer World, but these were inside baseball type stories. He was no bigger in that story than the person who fired him, John Sculley. The fact Jobs was the founder of NeXT was mentioned, but it was very much "Former Apple executive create impressive workstation". The articles would inevitably explain who Jobs was and why he was fired from Apple.

Over time, his rep grew. But don't discount that it wasn't during his first stint as major Apple executive.

FWIW he wore the turtleneck in his "comeback" after he rejoined Apple as iCEO. Before that he really was known for his suits.

A bit more about the latter. Beyond organophosphates, the main other alternative is pyrethroids. These are highly toxic to aquatic life, and they're contact poisons to pollinators just landing on the surface (some anti-insect clothing is soaked in pyrethrin for its effect). Also, neonicotinoids are often applied as seed coatings (which are taken up and spread through the plant), which primarily just affect the plant itself. Alternatives are commonly foliar sprays. This means drift to non-target impacts as well, such as in your shelterbelts, private gardens, neighbors' homes, etc. You also have to use far higher total pesticide quantities with foliar sprays instead of systematics, which not only drift, but also wash off, etc. Neonicotinoids can impact floral visitors, with adverse sublethal impacts but e.g. large pyrethroid sprayings can cause massive immediate fatal knockdown events of whole populations of pollinators.

Regrettable substitution is a real thing. We need to factor it in better. And that applies to nanoplastics as well.

Not really. The vacuum of space is a great insulator.

If global warming is indeed a hoax, why can't any real 'murican researchers disprove it? You'd be hailed as a hero to the MAGA camp and might be allowed to kiss dear leaders ring. Everyone keeps coming to the same conclusion except for a few fringe nutjobs who start going off about angels and the bible.

Simple math would tell you dissipating millions of watts of energy results in heat.

So, when we say microplastics, we really mainly mean nanoplastics - the stuff made from, say, drinking hot liquids from low-melting-point plastic containers. And yeah, they very much look like a problem. The strongest evidence is for cardiovascular disease. The 2024 NEJM study for example found that for patients with above-threshold levels of nanoplastics in cartoid artery plaque were 4,5x more likely to suffer from a heart attack. Neurologically, they cross the brain-blood barrier (and quite quickly). A 2023 study found that they cause alpha-synuclein to misfold and clump together, a halmark of Parkinsons and various kinds of dementia. broadly, they're associated with oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, protein aggregation, and neurotransmitter alterations. Oxidative stress is due to cells struggling to break down nanoplastics in them. They're also associated with immunotoxicity, inflammatory bowel disease, and reproductive dysfunction, including elevating inflammatory markers, impairing sperm quality, and modulating the tumor microenvironment. With respect to reproduction, they're also associated with epigenetic dysregulation, which can lead to heritable changes.

And here's one of the things that get me - and let me briefly switch to a different topic before looping back. All over, there's a rush to ban polycarbonate due to concerns over a degradation product (bisphenol-A), because it's (very weakly) estrogenic. But typical effective estrogenic activity from typical levels of bisphenol-A are orders of magnitude lower than that of phytoestrogens in food and supplements; bisphenol-A is just too rare to exert much impact. Phytoestrogens have way better PR than bisphenol-A, and people spend money buying products specifically to consume more of them. Some arguments against bisphenol-A focus on what type of estrogenic activity it can promote (more proliferative activity), but that falls apart given that different phytoestrogens span the whole gamut of types of activation. Earlier research arguing for an association with estrogen-linked cancer seems to have fallen apart in more recent studies. It does seem associated with PCOS, but it's hard to describe it as a causal association, because PCOS is associated with all sorts of things, including diet (which could change the exposure rate vs. non-PCOS populations) and significant hormonal changes (which could change the clearance rate of bisphenol-A vs. non-PCOS populations). In short, bisphenol-A from polycarbonate is not without concern, but the concern level seems like it should be much lower than with nanoplastics.

Why bring this up? Because polycarbonate is a low-nanoplastic-emitting material. It is a quite resilient, heat tolerant plastic, and thus - being much further from its glass transition temperature - is not particularly prone to shedding nanoplastics. By contrast, its replacements - polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthate, etc - are highly associated with nanoplastic release, particularly with hot liquids. So by banning polycarbonate, we increase our exposure to nanoplastics, which are much better associated with actual harms. And unlike bisphenol-A, which is rapidly eliminated from the body, nanoplastics persist. You can't get rid of them. If some big harm is discovered with bisphenol-A that suddenly makes the risk picture seem much bigger than with nanoplastics, we can then just stop using it, and any further harm is gone. But we can't do that with nanoplastics.

People seriously need to think more about substitution risks when banning products. The EU in particular is bad about not considering it. Like, banning neonicotinoids and causing their replacement by organophosphates, etc isn't exactly some giant win. Whether it's a benefit to pollinators at all is very much up in the air, while it's almost certain that the substitution is more harmful for mammals such as ourselves (neonicotinoids have very low mammalian toxicity, unlike e.g. organophosphates, which are closely related to nerve agents).

Its like it does not matter how bad the reality of climate change is, the media will report the guy who says its even worse.
Then maybe the extreme prediction is debunked, so people stop worrying, when the reality is still very bad.

Are microplastics bad like asbestos, or just the latest in a long line of scares of the day, like aluminium saucepans or cholesterol?

Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

tl;dr - research before you buy.

For people reading this thread. I'd recommend searching online about how well the suspend-resume works on Linux for the laptop model(s) you are interested in purchasing. Also worth looking into issues with very short battery life while in Linux. Because a lot of the power management ends up buried in some OEM options for the chipset windows drivers rather than properly expressed in the BIOS/UEFI.