If you stopped irrigating crops in the US desert southwest, there would be no water issues at all, either for households or for industry.

I'll repeat, it is agriculture that consumes meaningful amounts of water, not homes and businesses. Farms by water by the acre foot - an acre of land flooded to a depth of one foot. Water is not abundant on the scale of "farms buying it by the acre foot", but it absolutely is on the scale of "what you need for your house".

You left out that he doesn't only have one class.

"I'm sure if I cared enough to go looking".

So you just made a weird, false assumption in order to justify to yourself something you already wanted to do.

I used to have your viewpoint, by the way. The reality eventually became undeniable. Musk is a unique threat to western democracy.

Well, the use of AI *should* be encouraged, but that's a lousy way to do it. After graduation the students will need to live in a world where they deal with AI...but we don't know what the shape of that world will be.

OTOH, the main thing you're supposed to learn in mathematics classes is "the shape of mathematics". Learning to do the mathematics is secondary, now that calculators have advanced to AIs. (I've become nearly dependent on spell-check, but I don't really think of this as a problem.)

The tapes I was talking about were 800 bpi reels even parity. (The odd parity ones had better error recovery.)

How much energy does it take to drive to a laundromat and back?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant. It's agriculture that uses the overwhelming majority (70% of withdrawals and 80-90% of consumptive water use. Industry next (20% of withdrawals). Residential usage is way, way down the list, and washing machines are only 17% of that (well below for example lawn watering at about 30% overall, but which in some regions is over half of all consumption, and in the summer and times of water scarcity can be the vast majority). An early 1950s top-loader washing machine would use about 40-55 gal plus 0,3-0,5 kWh of electricity for the machine itself, and if your water wasn't municipally heated, heat would cost about 4,5-6,5kWh / 16-23 MJ (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a litre of gasoline / 0,13-0,19 gallons). At the then-standard 14-15 MPG in the US, that laundromat better not be more than 2-3 miles away if you're trying to save energy (just ignoring the energy they use to heat their water!)

For the record, while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides). For example, Bannon-acolyte Joe Allen on stage before a Trump rally a month ago warning the crowd:

Why wouldn’t you want a mosque in your neighborhood? Well, because the people in there aren’t like me. They don’t want the same future I do. Now, if you look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants. Already, if you look at Hugging Face, they’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.

Literally, this r/opensource mod set the policy: "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community." Does that sound very "leftist" to you? Yes, his reasoning was because translators use AI, but still, that's literally the opposite of appreciating and accommodating diversity.

I cannot find anything beyond that indicating how Wesley Wolfe (r/wolvereness, the mod) votes. What I can tell you is that there was a big backlash in the sub to his actions. Some amusing, like a person asking, "What do we use now that we've banned Linux? I can't afford Windows keys for all these damned servers." A lot of people seem to just be ignoring his rules. At the top of the sub right now is a post titled, "Linus Torvalds posts his AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap". It seems to have sparked vastly more AI discussion than it shut down.

That would have been really useful for some mag tape systems I used to use. They had too many errors for their error correction system.

OTOH, this kind of thing is very likely to have bugs. Test it THOROUGLY before folks start depending on it. Perhaps, after it passes initial tests, make it an optional choice in the installer, and require extra steps to do the install (with warnings: CAUTION: BETA FILE SYSTEM HAS BEEN CHOSEN).

File systems need more thorough testing that most software choices.

Currently a good rule of thumb is "If it's easy to check the answer relative to creating a good answer, AI is a good choice.". That's just a rule of thumb (i.e. it's not always true and use sense in applying it), and that's just "this was true up until this month from at least the start of the year". There's no guarantee that it will be true next month, but that's the way to bet. Next year gets more problematic.

OTOH, robots will introduce an entirely new set of problems. But this rule of thumb is pretty likely to be good for them when they start being significant.

Yeah, it *is* better, if you can afford it. Just don't forget that it's dangerous. Care is needed. Possibly even extreme care.

A point, but that's a place the "selection" part of evolution comes in.

I said "good method". There are lots of ways to estimate things. And using the best methods for cells, some cells will be estimated older than other cells in the same body. Many estimates rely on epigenetic markers, but those can be removed either artificially or by normal processes...but that doesn't make the cell actually younger, and here by "younger" I mean "more error free" (i.e. more similar to the initial cell from which the body was generated [and "similar" is tricky to define in this context]), what it does is allow cells that have been marked "dubious" for one reason or another to begin reproducing again. DNA copying is NOT perfect. Each cell in your body is most likely mutated from the original cell. Most (surviving) mutants are harmless, but some aren't. So cells that have reproduced the "estimated maximum safe number of times" stop dividing. (There are exceptions, like the cells linking the intestines, but those are kept to as minimal a number as is feasible.)

I had just mentioned the reason:
Cells tend to accumulate mutations. This is especially true each time they divide. And this is well known. If your evolutionary line didn't include a such a limit, you would likely not be around due to any of a number of problems, cancer among them.

There is no good marker for the "age" of a cell. Mutations tend to accumulate over life, and there's a reason for the Hayflick limit (even if it isn't universal).

Manipulating cells so that they will continue dividing is dangerous to whoever gets them. It may be necessary, but don't fool yourself about its danger. This sounds like a recipe for brain cancer.

Who is this "they"? A story I read yesterday said that PHP was being maintained by a single maintainer.