Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

Based on my analysis of their needs and what AI can deliver. I agree that it's management's job to increase efficiency and output, but change for change's sake is never good. For instance, in the examples above I *knew* what AI would deliver. I told them, in no uncertain terms, what product they'd receive. They still made the decision to push ahead ( and I'm more than willing to cash that check ). I can see, objectively and by any metric, that what was delivered is a worse customer experience than what they had before.

However, because it's "AI", that makes it acceptable. The buzzword has effectively disabled the rational and critical thinking parts of this management's teams brains. Of course I have seen this before ( First rule of IT: Vendors lie, Second rule of IT: Managers believe them ), but to this extent? Especially in smaller businesses, where margins are tighter. For what they're paying for this AI solution ( ha, "solution" ), they could afford to hire another staff member; another person on the phones, and far more capable than AI in delivering the ultimate product ( caring for the patient ).

Mind you; I pointed all this out to them. They know the math, but they are so...enamored with AI that it doesn't mean anything to them. Meanwhile, patients and staff hate it.

I'm sure there's AI use cases out there which deliver a decent ROI. What I'm seeing in the field, however, is management hysteria for the latest thing at a scale I've never before experienced.

I shouldn't complain, it's paying extremely well, but I know this will all come crashing down at some point.

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

I'm on a Q820 from 17 years ago at home.

Still runs fine, still had more RAM and disc than a number of new laptops which is a bit sad.

I remember the nimbus!

My school had a network of discless machines.

They could also boot into BBC mode with a reasonably good BBCBasic interpreter and RM mode as xxx well.

They were pretty good in their niche, really though the Archi was a fool 32 bit very fast RISC computer that knocked the competition into a cocked hat. Struggled on a bit but then vanquished into the embedded space until a few years ago.

I've been through more than a few technology cycles, so while I don't necessary disagree with you, the scale of the disconnect between the worker bees and management is more significant than I ever remember.

It's becoming exceedingly difficult to dissuade management from AI courses of action, even when they make no sense or will end up delivering a substandard product for significantly higher cost.

For instance, I just had a client implement an AI auto-attendant for a medical office. Were they having difficulties answer the phone in a timely manner? No. Do they anticipate a staffing shortage that would cause such an issue? No. Will the auto-attendant be able to accomplish what a regular worker can? No. In fact, it can pretty much only answer the phone and find someone for the caller to talk to.

But by god, management had to have it. So, for an extra 2000 a month they get a middle man that delays delivering service to patients. Management loves it. Folks answering the calls hate it because the patients hate it.

Different office asked about AI curated music. Another client asked about replacing our network monitoring software with AI so their IT staff can stop working after hours. They both will end up getting their wish, and at least in the case of the network monitoring solution it's going to cause so many issues I'm having them sign a waiver before I implement; I won't be held responsible when the AI agent is rebooting servers randomly because it thinks they're offline.

More than any other IT fad over the past 2 decades, I've noticed AI has really divided "decision makers" and "makers/workers". Those of us in the trenches making things work are highly skeptical of AI and treat it much as we have any other "flash in the pan" technology; weary, willing to test/play with it, but disbelieving of the hype.

The decision makers though...whoooboy, they've bought into the tech hook, line and sinker. They want AI everything, even in places it makes no sense. They can't define what they want AI to do, or how it's supposed to do it, but by god they will sign away millions of dollars in pursuit of their golden cow.

The only time I really saw anything like this was with "Teh Cloudz!", but even then it was tempered by practicality. AI? It's magic beans, all the way down.

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

1941 to 1990

You mean 1939?

Oh yeah wait a mo America only "came to its allies aid" after being attacked. That my man is not being a reliable ally, that's being purely self interested.