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Comment Re:Greed and infrastructure do not mix (Score 1) 146

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

Comment Re:Brian Kernighan nailed this decades ago (Score 3, Interesting) 120

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

Comment Re:It stops the development of new knowledge too (Score 4, Insightful) 120

Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 72

Nuclear reactors use most surface water, not ground water.

Datacentres are no pickier. You can even cool a datacentre with saltwater, you just need a heat exchanger.

Also, closed loop does not evaporate. The loop is not closed if stuff escapes from it.

You're arguing with the actual terminology used in the nuclear industry. "Closed loop" or "closed cycle" designs have the water pumped in a cycle through cooling towers. The towers lose water to evaporation, taking heat with them, but the rest of the water is returned to be reheated again. "Open loop" or "open cycle" designs have no cooling towers. The water is heated and just discharged hot. They consume much more water (over an order of magnitude more), but most of that is returned. Closed loop are more common, but you see open loop in some older designs, and in seawater-cooled reactors.

Comment Re:According to the summary... (Score 1) 107

I've printed many hundreds of kg on my P1S, thanks.

I do not consider having to write data out to a card and transport it back and forth between the printer and the computer to be the pinnacle of convenience. That's something that would be considered embarrassingly inconvenient for a 1980s printer, let alone a modern net-connected device. And it's designed to be inconvenient for non-cloud prints for a reason.

Comment Re:It's all about definitions. (Score 3) 177

I have no complaint with the idea that most students simply won't be able to achieve an A-grade if the material is both challenging and taught to proper standards, but I have a major problem with the notion that teachers are required to deny students that have mastered well above 90% of the material an A-grade because other students managed to yet outperform them. I hate the idea of grading on a curve. One should be judged against the mastery of the material, not comparatively against other students during that particular semester.

That said, I have also had college classes where I really should have failed the class but because of the curve, I got an A because I had the highest scores. While some of that reflects upon me, a good chunk of that reflects upon the instructor, the department and its head, and the curricula for that particular course. If students are to be held to high standards then instructors should likewise be held to high standards, and so should their institutions. If they cannot produce results then that should reflect both upon them and upon the revenue they receive in tuition.

Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 72

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)

Comment Re:That makes sense. (Score 4, Interesting) 81

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.

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