Hah! It's so beautiful...

Not doubting this, but are there really 3.1 dialogs? I can think of multiple control panels and other screens that haven't seen much change since NT4, but my memories of 3.1 dialogs are getting hazy at this point!

Yes! I get the feeling there are more than a few people on Slashdot (and elsewhere) that just don't get this. Over the last few years I've had multiple Gen Z coworkers for whom installing the desktop version of MS Office is _literally_ the first software they have installed outside of a mobile app store.

What's more, you really have to know what you're doing to coax it into re-using code, rather than rewriting the same functionality with each prompt.

I agree with the last part in parethenses. Do you have citations for the rest?

Not for lack of trying. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/judge-blocks-rfk-jr-from-scaling-back-childhood-vaccine-recommendations.

Bwah? The article I linked to is on Harvard's news site. It is not just about Harvard. As that article notes there's been about 500 million dollars of contracts canceled. Note that even if that were all Harvard (which it isn't) that would be a sizable chunk even in their endowment. And this has on top of that had a major chilling effect causing corporations to stop doing mRNA treatment research in general.

The US does a lot less preventative medicine than peer European countries, so lower vaccination rates harm a lot more here. And aside from changing the vaccine schedules, they've done a lot else which I mentioned. Like cancelling all the mRNA research https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/slashing-of-funding-for-mrna-vaccine-development-raises-concern/ which is going to have massive long-term damaging consequences.

Minor note: Carter did not have solar cells in the sense of electrical production on the White House. Carter had solar water heating panels but they were not "solar cells" but just direct solar heating for water. See https://projectsolar.com/blogs/solar/white-house-solar-panels. Solar cells at the time were still very expensive and not very efficient.

A stopped clock is right twice a day is the old cliche. Concerns about microplastics are legitimate and are particularly linked to inflammation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969723075757 and cardiovascular issues https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11009876 among other concerns. We don't know how serious this is, but it is at least a problem and should be looked at furhter. This is a good thing, and should be recognized as such. That the same government is refusing to deal with CO2 and is actively trying to hinder the development of solar and wind power still holds. And I'm sure the damage to vaccines and sabotaging any new vaccine research or mRNA treatments will kill far more people than are helped by this. But it is a problem when science is politicized, and that's what's caused them to be so bad on other issues. It would be a mistake to start associating legitimate concerns about microplastics with the right-wing. Unfortunately, these same people are obviously trying to do that by connecting this to "MAHA" which is really more about really dumb ideas about masculinity and anti-vax attitudes masquerading as science. Don't let the justified contempt for these people cause one to start thinking that microplastics aren't a real problem.

I have a distant family connection to Santa Fe and have visited a number of times. Lovely place.

What always strikes me is the history of the city and region. Founded in 1610, it's one of the earliest European cities in the Americas.

When reading the history of American Indian sites, so many of them prospered at times for decades (or more) and then declined with ecological shifts, i.e., droughts. The greater regional area had a population in the thousands or tens of thousands at most, and that fluctuated widely. The population of Santa Fe was as low as 5,000 people at the start of the 20th century. It was a small place! But, that's probably, realistically, a lot closer to the actual carrying capacity of the land.

Desert. Too many people. Not enough water.

Something has to give!

China has been a great success story in many, many ways, but they have now passed the point of "easy gains." Central planning, as with all things, works--until it doesn't. In retrospect, it seems like they held onto the one-child policy for too long.

China's population is massive and has historically been massive (relative to the rest of the world). When the Founders were signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia (population circa 30,000) and the 13 British colonies had a population between 1.5 and 2 million, China's population was probably over 300 million. Anything that happens in China is massive!

China should be commended for their efforts to grow the middle class, though I feel the evidence is not entirely there yet. China's population percentage that's middle class is still dramatically smaller than the EU, US, Japan, etc. Potentially even Russia. (The Soviet Union is another great success story for pulling an absolutely massive people out of literal serfdom and into the middle class.)

Today, China's total fertility rate is reported as one of the lowest in the entire world--0.93 in 2025. And that's if you believe the reported numbers. East Asia is being hit very, very hard by crashing reproductive rates. It's happening all over the world, but China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, etc., have just crashed.

Stagnating can mean many things (population growth, cultural growth, scientific growth) and I'm talking specifically population as the rest is downstream of that.

JavaScript is actually a pretty interesting, powerful language, but one with quite a few problems. (I recommend the book JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford if you want to learn more about that.) TypeScript solves some, but by no means all, of those problems. From what I've heard, it's increasingly popular.

"The Spoils of War" by Andrew Cockburn. Goes way back to American soldiers having to steal boots off dead Chinese soldiers in Korea to get decent boots, their feet were freezing off.

"The Pentagon Wars" by Col. James F Burton. Burton was part of the 1980s "Fighter Mafia" who got the F-16 built, against Pentagon tendencies for every new plane to be twice the weight and twice the cost of the last one. (The F-35 continues the tradition.) They were the ones who publicized the $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat.

Cockburn laments that people thought it only applied to some things, when their point was that every $1 lightbulb on the console was $25 to replace.

Burton notes that one Army logistics guy got the price of a single uranium bullet down from $80 to $4 by whipsawing two suppliers into real competition, another reduction every purchasing round, for years. That guy gave a presentation to a roomful of Stars on it, and came back to his desk to find retirement papers waiting. Or a transfer to Thule. His choice.

1) They don't need to turn the core on Earth. 2) Core's don't get straight from slightly enriched uranium to plutonium to highly radioactive in a few seconds. They take time for radioactivity to build up as there are more fission products.

I wonder how this is different from....child actors and actresses? Child beauty pageants? Etc. Plenty of parents financially benefit in some way from their kids. Could, or should, Macaulay Culkin be able to get Home Alone taken down? I don't know.

I'm all in favor of allowing now-adults to clean the slate. I think your philosophy is a good one, and it's one I try to follow.

A guy I know has a troubled kid. He posted so many intimate details of that kid's life from birth through age about 15--everything from daily happenings, getting in trouble at school, what special needs camps the kid was attending, how upset he and his wife as parents were, what kind of events triggered the kid to have meltdowns, etc. He was also a paid blogger for GeekDad and way overshared there too. I was always appalled, but it took the kid basically telling the dad to fuck off and stop broadcasting all the details of the kid's life before anything changed.

Some (most?) people just cannot handle social media.

In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes. As for the idea that there's a lot of data centers being built in the Southwest, more are being built or planned to be built in California or on the East Coast. Northern Virgina is the fastest growing region for data centers. See map here https://usdatamap.com/ (This isn't a perfect map. The situation is in flux. And admittedly, this map doesn't show size of them. My impression is that at least some of the ones being built in Arizona are very large so the map here isn't showing everything.)

Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, one has historical water rights to contend with. In many jurisdictions for major water resources, historical users get priority over new users, so farmers and others would get priority before data centers if it came down to that. (Yes, this does mean that in parts of California, golf courses get priority over some other uses.)

This is not remotely why AI systems are being used. ChatGPT is being used daily by hundreds of millions of people https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users. Right now, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world by some independent metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites. These systems are not being used just because some rich people want to not have to pay people or bother with civility. The regular, common people are using them. Understanding where this is going, the impacts it will have, both positive and negative, requires understanding the actual usage, not what one imagines it to be.

The water use for AI seems to be greatly exaggerated. Estimating water use complicated. Different data centers use different amounts of water. Also, systems need more water use for cooling when the weather is hot, so centers may use more water in summer. A data center will use more water when the center is at close to maximum usage, so data centers will use less water if they are handling queries when few users are using the system. Complicating things even further, some people are counting not just data cooling water but also counting the indirect water use from the needed electricity production (fossil fuel and nuclear plants use a fair bit of water for their steam turbines). There's a good article here discussing the difficulties in making water estimates https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 However, all things considered. they estimate that all things considered it takes about 39 milliliters of water per a typical query. Now, for comparison, a high efficiency shower uses about 1.5 gallons of water a minute, which is about 95 ml of water a second. So making a query to an LLM AI system costs less than a second of water. If this estimate is off even by a factor of 3, this is equivalent to taking 1 second longer on a shower. The water use is just not hat high. The total water use is also not very high. If for example you use estimates for how much water is used by golf courses in the US https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf, the largest estimates of AI use put the water use as about a tenth of the water use by golf courses, and golf course water estimates put it at most about 1% of total US water use. So even if one is concerned, just getting rid of some of the gigantic water hungry golf courses in California and Arizona (seriously who the heck puts a golf course in Arizona) would largely offset this. Now, it is true that as data centers grow, more water will likely get used. But as we switch to more wind and solar power, the indirect water use will go down, and data center builders are working hard on reducing water use since it is such a hotbutton issue.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.