That makes the narrative that data-centers are 'water hungry' very effective at causing unrest.

Which is probably why that narrative gets pushed so hard. You CAN build a datacentre with evaporative cooling and that will use a lot of water. You can also build one with a closed loop and radiators that doesn't use any water except for the original fill. You can even build one that's air cooled and doesn't use any water at all.

All of those options also apply to anything else that needs to be cooled, which is pretty much everything.

Scanning for Starbucks cups, flagging possible continuity errors, pose estimation and tracking for motion capture, inserting CGI, rendering, there are all sorts of boring tasks that could be automated or improved if already automated.

How can you tell how many red balls there are in the bin if you don't properly sample its contents?

Because I told you:

"a bin full of blue balls with one red ball in it"

If we dropped 8% of a system's capabilities each revision cycle, pretty soon there wouldn't be much left.

The argument that changes to support the majority use case compromise important minority ones is a reasonable one. You didn't make that argument. In what I presume was your effort to be pithy your brain cast "most" to "all" and you provided a single counterexample.

I saw a funny cartoon today. Someone pointed to a bin full of blue balls with one red ball in it and said "most of these balls are blue." Then someone else pointed to the red ball and said "what do you mean, there's a red ball right there."

It does. It requires that batteries be "removeable by the end-user" and that replacement batteries should also be availble to the end-user. The definition of end-user replaceable is as you say though.

It seems the EU thinks the ability to use basic tools is a reasonable requirement, unlike the average Slashdot user.

The United States started restricting export of computers in 1949. When the G4 exceeded the performance limit to be classified as a mulition in 1999 Apple ran ads about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Advanced computations required for frontier AI" sounds better than "adds and multiplies faster than our arbitrary limit" and way less stupid than "now that this is a munition we have discontinued the translucent blueberry and frost white color option in favour of a more professional 'graphite' color scheme. Mirrored drive doors will be an option in the future."

The same cold war ideas as ever.

1. Find or make a boogey man enemy to scare the population
2. Profit

Yes, OceanGate tried to wiggle out of safety regulations at every opportunity. Transportation regulators are very familiar with maneuvers like that. OceanGate accepted money for services. In fact, the whole company was set up to do just that. You can call your customers blueberry pancakes if you want, but it doesn't matter.

That's why you can't, for example, take your buddies flying with your private pilots license and let them pay for gas, or make a profit from taking your friends out on your boat.

OceanGate was offering a commercial service. Pretty much all commercial services are regulated for good reasons. Operating an uncertified submersible as a passenger service is no different than operating a cab that hasn't seen a mechanic in a decade, or an passenger air service on a homebuilt plane.

The difference is that you don't like the people who died.

The heat and especially pressure make good espresso makers big and expensive. Ultrasonic emitters are cheap, small and plentiful.

Espresso is a base for other coffee drinks, hot and cold. Putting a shot of room temperature espresso from a dispenser into one of those is going to save quite a bit of both time and money at the scale of something like a Starbucks franchise, and if you're getting your coffee from that kind of chain you're either not going to notice any difference anyway - or deny ever being there in the case of the coffee snobs. No more scooping grounds, prepping the machine, and forcing hot water through the grounds into the cup; the barista just shoves the cup under an optic, pushes a button, then moves onto the next step.

The real savings though are going to come for the manufacturers of those pre-bottled coffee drinks you find in the chillers at supermarkets; that's the kind of scale TFS is alluding to; where the coffee is brewed in industrial sized vats. Especially so if the concentrate approach is viable; add one 10L (or whatever) carton to your vat, then dilute with whatever milk/fake-milk/water/flavouring combinations needed to assemble your pre-bottled coffee-based drink. Coffee snobs are not admitting to buying those either. Also, as a side-benefit, there will be less waste as the grounds will be processed centrally so can be collected and fed into a suitable secondary product - they're excellent for providing fertiliser for some plants, for instance.

All of which probably saves you enough power and money (globally) to run a single AI data centre for a few minutes, but such is the price of progress I guess. :)

And while mini nuclear reactors are a real thing, they are a fantastically dumb real thing.

I accidentally replied to another poster instead of you.

If you live in a western country, there's a decent chance a university near you has a small reactor, with students operating it. There's one just down the road from where I am now. It's been operating since 1959. I've been there. My father pushed the buttons back when he was a grad student.

You are correct. Sorry about that.

"Paying customers" is a pretty common differentiator. If you're in the land of the free it's pretty easy to get a pilot's license. It's quite a bit harder to get one that allows you to take paying customers... even if the paying customer is your buddy chipping in for gas. There are similarly different rules for the aircraft itself. Many motor vehicles too.

The GGPs view doesn't really have anything to do with that. They're probably okay with it because the people on the sub had more money than they do. Except the kid, but he's tainted by association I guess. None of them were oligarchs.

Stockton Rush's net worth was in the $10-20 million range and he famously dodged regulations rather than trying to wield political power to change them.

Nargeolet was a deep sea researcher whose main asset seems to have been his $1.5 million house.

Harding might have been a billionaire but nobody really knows. The most political things he seems to have done were some space advocacy in the UAE and volunteering a jet from his company to help fly some cheetahs to India.

Dawood's net worth seems to have been between $400-500 million. He did speak at the UN on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, was a trustee for one of King Charles' charities and was an advocate for mental health and education in Pakistan. Not really oligarch stuff.

We canucks have this idea that irresponsible CEOs shouldn't be allowed to go around killing people. When part of the system fails we investigate, make recommendations, and try to fix it. That's not "self-loathing."

You know, if I could make a recommendation, you guys might want to consider trying it.