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Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 66

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 2, Insightful) 62

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.

Comment Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon... (Score 4, Interesting) 174

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?...

Comment Re:Certainly more useful (Score 1) 94

I've been a rider for about 15 years. The absence of shifting is one of the things which makes EVs significantly less fun (in both cars and bikes/scooters). Even video games and movies recognize this in how they implement futuristic EVs.

The clutch on a bike is also more important than the clutch on a car, and it's a big part of the feel of a bike. Motorcycle clutches are 'wet', you can be half-on and half-off clutch. This is useful for helping control against engine torque to the wheels, 'engine braking' as well as controlling launch. For anyone accustomed to riding, it's a necessary feature, because it's literally how motorcycles work. Remove it and it doesn't feel like the same thing; it removes a lot of the enjoyment and tactility of the activity, and subsequently the enjoyment, of controlling a machine. It feels like you're doing something (and you are).

EVs feel more like a railcar, it's the exact opposite of the freedom of movement that motorcycles give you.

Comment Re:Stop purchasing Bambu products (Score 2) 102

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?

Comment Recreating traditional controls can be useful (Score 3, Interesting) 94

At first I thought this was really dumb. Besides, how can you patent something that's non-existent. But then I figured it can be useful to recreate familiar controls and how they feel. Makes it easier, especially in competition, to back and forth between different types with no loss of skill and reflex. I mean these are recreational machines. Let them have fun regardless.

There is precedence for simulating the action and feel of controls. Happens in aircraft all the time to help ease the burdens of type rating. And I realized that all my newer tractors on the farm no longer have a clutch in the same sense as the old dry clutch days, yet they still have a pedal that simulates it electronically. Technically they call it an inching pedal.

Comment Re:Sounds familiar (Score 1) 12

The problem at AWS is that they largely don't have 'core competencies' anymore, and haven't realized it yet.

They used to be a company which embraced new ways of doing things and doing small, agile things quickly. That hasn't been the case for half a decade now - in part due to cultural changes pushed from the top, but largely hasn't been the case for a while.

You'd think a cloud company with a fully distributed global infrastructure would have been one of the forefront proponents of remote work, and they did lean in on that a little bit at first, but quickly reversed course - in part due to the kinds of people they'd started hiring in excess not working. Those people are predominantly NOT the traditional hard charging, results-oriented people they used to hire, and are instead people who seem to prefer meeting over doing.

Comment Re:Altman vs Musk (Score 1) 57

His own sister has made rape and sexual assault accusations against Altman, which supposedly went on for decades. He's "questionable" at best with regard to the murder of one of his prior coworkers/employees who was going to blow the whistle. I'm not sure what Musk has done comparable.

Comment Altman vs Musk (Score 5, Insightful) 57

Neither is a particularly endearing character, but of the 2, Altman gives me more of the "serial killer who'd poison your entire family to get what he wants, turn your back and he'll take your wallet" type of evil, and Musk more the "we're going to leave everyone on earth to die, want to have my child?" kind of evil. I'm not sure which is worse ... but in this case, Musk clearly has a better argument against OpenAI than OpenAI has in its defense - merely from the 'nonprofit to profit' basis, ignoring the intent and other aspects about safety.... which is certainly concerning in its own right.

OT, but... the way these big shops seem to be doing 'safety' is an idiotic bolt-on approach, from what I can see: it's all after-the-fact. If you give your agent/model a foundational prompt like "You're a helpful bot", that colors everything it does after that. They need to have a moral/foundations layer which does the same thing, perhaps even trained on its own very insular dataset that's been curated to meet objectives that can help it rank the value of different data. That way Reddit or some postgrad's humanities paperwork doesn't get the same criterial evaluation as, say, Socrates, Einstein, or the Bible. Maybe they do that - but it certainly doesn't seem like it, based on how easy it is to get them to disobey "safety" guidelines.

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