You might want to check your sources.

Here's Anthropic's writeup (March). They say:

Here's Mozilla's writeup:

The myth that AI data centers are using up all the water comes from some incorrect citations that have then swept through sensationalist and poorly fact-checked (looking at you Washington Post) news stories. One major contributor was Karen Hat's "Empire of AI" which overstated the usage by three orders of magnitude. (She did publicly correct that, but you can guess how many people are interested in the non-sensational numbers).

For proportion, California almond growers use 90x the fresh water of all US data centers combined.

Which is not to say that a data center can't still be a strain for some communities, but not in a more extraordinary way than e.g. the local university wanting to maintain a golf course.

But "AI IS SUCKING UP ALL THE WATER PEOPLE NEED TO SURVIVE!!!" is a wonderfully concrete - if completely false - complaint for people uneasy about the recent advances in technology to latch onto

So this has nothing to do with the building being a "data center" at all. The water used if for construction and it could just as well be a stadium or an apartment complex. But since people are talking about data centers using water we'll take any opportunity to jump in on that even if it's amplifying a misconception by mentioning it in adjacency to unrelated events.

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

We are in an economic mania right now. Governments, corporations, startups, you name it, are all afraid of being left behind. They are buying up memory, disks, computing capacity because, well, if they don't, someone else--one of their competitors--will.

Supply will be expanded and built out while demand remains high.

How long will this take? That's the trillion dollar question. It could be months or it could be years, but at some point, demand and supply will come back into closer to equilibrium. Whether that's because demand crashes or because supply builds up to meet demand is another open question. This has to be one of the greatest repositioning of capital in recent memory.

Can you answer the question of why he would lie about either exactly? What is his sourced motivation? How does that stack against his incentive to not blithely throw away his career as an accomplished academic?

The actual explanation is much simpler. He is a world-reknown biologist, not a computer scientist or philosopher. He sounds dumb talking about what he is not an expert in.

You (I assume) have some developed expertise in the AI tooling. You (quite obviously) do not have any expertise in biology, or even the context of Dawkins statements you are alluding to, so you sound at least as dumb characterizing what he has said as "anti-trans crap."

Hah, agreement on something!

But, how do you know that humans aren't deterministic? Maybe my exact brain and body, when given the exact same external stimuli over the past however many years, would produce the exact same results? Can't prove it either way, so are you operating on faith and belief about human intelligence?

LLMs are generally considered a combination of stochastic and deterministic (training, specifically). Critics often use the term "stochastic parrots," for example. Since LLMs rely on randomness, if you have a truly random number source, does that make them non-deterministic?

Probably better to not go down this road.

It's too bad, because Dawkins has written some interesting things, and hey, being the inventor of the word "meme" and memetics is a pretty big deal.

His reaction here is just astoundingly ignorant. Reading the dialog where he makes a Trump joke and the LLM responds (predictably) sycophanticly is, to use the modern parlance, just cringe. I would have hoped for a more informed take.

Hah, you're losing your touch! I've seen you troll far better than this.

Ok, then point me to a post on Slashdot where someone says (roughly, even) "it is all just known" when it comes to human intelligence or the brain."

Are you confused or talking to the wrong person? I have said many times that my position is that the existence of a brain that produces intelligence is evidence that human-type intelligence can be built or simulated. If it exists, it can be built. Disagreeing, Gweiher, literally in the post before mine, brought up the concept of "Physicalism." Physicalism is, definitionally, a metaphysical belief. The opposite of physicalism is another metaphysical belief, idealism, that more or less centers around the belief that reality is formed in the mind and spirit.

So, no, I did not bring up metaphysics or spiritualism.

Unbelievable...

That's pretty myopic thinking.

First of all, you're wrong. An attacker does not need "console" access but rather does need some kind of shell or execution ability. Given how sophisticated attacks today are often chains of vulnerabilities, I would not at all be surprised to see cPanel or other web vulnerabilities chained with this. Furthermore, if someone who doesn't work for you already has that level of access (meaning ability to execute a program on a computer), you already screwed up? Ok, and what if a trusted user account is compromised?

I don't understand the reaction.

For small values of "interesting" perhaps!

Point taken.

I think that's a fair statement. I'm personally not terribly interested in metaphysics. It's one of those topics that strikes me as like Christians arguments on the nature of Christ--is Christ purely divine? Is he both man and divine? Is he just a human? I feel like no matter how much energy I (or anyone!) expends on the metaphysical stuff, there's no answer, and not even a way of proving who is right or wrong. And, if I'm wrong? So what? A bit too ethereal for me!

In general, in the absence of decisive evidence either way, I would lean towards "it's possible" as opposed to "it's impossible."

I have never seen anyone on slashdot claim that "it is all just known" when it comes to human intelligence or the brain. Literally, never. It is also absolutely incorrect to say that we have no clue how the human--we have many clues. I have said repeatedly that we don't know it all. What we do know is that humans exist, and humans have human intelligence.

I posited earlier that if it exists, it can be built.

If you want to change the conversation to a metaphysical conversation about the nature of reality and your spiritual beliefs, then who even cares about your complaints about LLM technology? If you insist that human-type intelligence can never be built or simulated, prove that it can never happen. That's just like, your opinion, man.

I had an interesting exchange with Gweihir recently. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he seems to be of the opinion that it is not proven that the human brain is responsible for human intelligence, that there is something special about human intelligence (that he also believes cannot be simulated or reproduced), and that understanding human intelligence is potentially impossible.

He says "Ah, yes, the deranged claim that we know how the human mind works and it is purely mechanistic. You just excluded yourself from rational discussion by pushing a quasi-religious dogma with no supporting scientifically sound evidence." (Gweihir also often capitalizes "Science".)

I don't know what he believes, but it kind of seems like he believes there is something ineffably unique and special about human intelligence, and he's offended that people ascribe similar "intelligence" words to AI and LLMs. If he wasn't so anti-religious, I would think he was some kind of fundamentalist.

In any case, thank you for the article link to SciAm. It was interesting.

Yes, definitely.

I've been using both Claude and ChatGPT to help me understand a PL/B (a.k.a. DATABUS, similar to COBOL) codebase that I've inherited. It's been great to help with that. The constant gotos, subroutines spread across multiple files, modules, etc., can be really hard to follow across a million+ lines. The company that developed it originally had the same programmers working on it from 1970 to the 2010s. It's dead now, legacy, but still in usage. I have not implemented any LLM generated code, but I did use claude to analyze the compiler and the PL/B source to implement a C program that works with the same file database locking semantics.