cdrini

Programming on a phone is a tough sell for many since typing is slower and you have less screen real estate to view/debug the code. Using an AI agent and typing only prompts makes it more compelling. You input less, and only occasionally have to edit code instead of writing everything from 0. And even with editing, typing a prompt like "separate the X logic from class Y into a new file/class" is much faster on mobile than the equivalent actions.

Perhaps; but I would argue talking to many AI evangelists is a form of selection bias. Which makes the false dichotomy conclusion reasonable given the inputs, but still inaccurate given reality.

True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.

For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.

> the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.

This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?

There have been such a large number of OCR tools pop up over the past ~year; sorely in need for some benchmarks to compare them. Would love to see support for normal OCR tools like tesseract, EasyOCR, Microsoft Azure, etc. I'm using these for some projects, and my experiments with VLMs for OCR have resulted in too much hallucination for me to switch. Benchmarks comparing across this aisle would be incredibly useful.

Neat idea! Not sure if I'm willing to register just try it, though. Having the main feed public would be nice! Or even a sample feed.

> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.

I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.

Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?

Wow what a flashback! I think I used to use this back in the day.

What an interesting use case! And interesting composition.

One thing that's interesting about the AI violin cover is that I'm not sure those runs would be physically possible at that speed on a real violin. So that composition can _only_ be played digitally, I believe.

Not OP, but on the off chance you haven't seen this, I found the suno explorer thing quite nice. Hitting random a few times, I'll usually stumble onto something interesting. This was the first demo I heard where some of the AI tunes gave me goosebumps close to what human music does.

https://suno.com/explore/

I would say too soon to tell. There has been an uptick in ebook slop, but I'm not sure if it's impacted the homogeneity of literature, because I don't think anyone is reading ai ebooks. It's not enough for it to exist to impact culture, it has to be being consumed.

Music is a uniquely interesting case, since music has a much lower barrier of entry to consume.

It's unclear to me whether it will result in more homogeneity, as a result of prompts being a coarse medium that results in the AI choosing what it's seen to fill in the rest, or less homogeneity, as a result of more people with non-mainstream tastes being able to create music aligned with their niche that otherwise wouldn't exist due time/money restrictions. I think the latter seems a bit more likely, but time will tell.

I think for me my main gripe with air travel is how hard it is to predict the price and how high the prices are. It takes me like a day of research to book a flight due to how careful I have to be to confirm what luggage I'm allowed/etc. And it's incredibly easy for me to get burned because aggregator sites like Google flights can't tell you eg how much a carry-on would cost, so I have to try to determine if the cheaper flight is _actually_ cheaper, etc etc. And I'm tired of having family have to pay crazy hundred dollar + fees for an extra carry on because the eco light ticket (although the ticket just says eco on it) doesn't actually include a personal item, that's only part of the eco ticket, and since you're at the counter that's going to be $100 fee for you to carry a purse onto the plane. -_- Shout out Condor.

Otherwise I find everything ok. The flights are fine -- packed but it is what it is there's high demand. I could do with/without the food if it reduced the price, I can pack my own. But otherwise I find them fine.

What makes air travel miserable for you?

I see they offer free cancellations and refunds for their two top-tier tickets, but can't find a reference for them offering it for all tickets. Do you have a link?

https://mobile.southwest.com/fare-information/

That would be reasonable, but I think I could take it or leave it. Planes fill up more than hotels would be my guess, so they'd need a buffer window of like a month? At which point the difference between having and not having cancellation protection seems negligible to me.

I think charging a fee for passenger cancellation insurance is reasonable; the airline takes on a decent amount of risk if a consumer can cancel at any time.

> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations

Airline cancellations. Seeing as they're talking about making a change, I assume it's airline cancellations, since no airline will currently refund you for a passenger cancellation.

Wow! Careful Icarus, going too fast makes it go kind of wild and started freezing the site :P

data.whiteBall.v.x = data.whiteBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.x = 10;

The best research I've seen on this is:

- Threatening or tipping a model generally has no significant effect on benchmark performance.

- Prompt variations can significantly affect performance on a per-question level. However, it is hard to know in advance whether a particular prompting approach will help or harm the LLM's ability to answer any particular question.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00614

The way I like to describe it is that you can't go from 1 developer to 0 thanks to AI, but you might be able to go from 10 to 9. Although not sure what the exact numbers are.

Update: appears fixed now

Hmm is it just me or is this webpage loading with all the text invisible? Firefox+Android.

Hmm, I think the hype is mainly for image editing, not generating. Although note I haven't used it! How are you testing it?

I think I'd push back and say that nerd culture is no longer really a single thing. Back in the star trek days, the nerd "community" was small enough that star trek could be a defining quality shared by the majority. Now the nerd community has grown, and there are too many people to have defining parts of the culture that are loved by the majority.

Eg if the nerd community had $x$ people in the star trek days, now there are more than $x$ nerds who like anime and more than $x$ nerds who dislike it. And the total size is much bigger than both.

Is the version on Forgejo closed to public contribution?

I sometimes feel like we throw around the word fact too often. If I misspell a wrd, does that mean I have committed a factual inaccuracy? Since the wrd is explicitly spelled a certain way in the dictionary?

TLDR: That article is pretty low quality, and the "caused millions of people absolutely unrelated to it to have to ration water" doesn't seem like a reasonable conclusion. It's not mentioned at all in the source article. I took some notes on this article and traced back the research to the original article by The Austin Chronicle which is significantly better: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2025-07-25/texas-is-sti... , would recommend.

Main takeaways:

- Why are we building data centres so close to the equator where it's hot.

- It's depressing to see the high quality reporting from The Austin Chronicle watered down into more and more clickbaity soundbytes as it gets recycled through other "news" orgs. But at the same time, I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise.

- The water evaporation was interesting to me, and would love to read more on what percentage evaporates, and whether the Stargate plans to build non-evaporative cooling will actually hold out and how that'll impact the water grid.

- Would love some more info/context on that 463 mil number, but stopping my research here for now. Combining this with when/how often Texas has to ration its water would provide a stronger argument in support/against the provided claim of water rationing.

- The fact that we don't have good numbers for how much water data centres are using is crazy, we need that level of granularity/regulation.

- Markers of poor reporting:

- Numbers without context/clarity. Would it kill these sites to include a bar chart.

- Citations of sites that market engaging/entertaining

- Ambiguous / contradictory data

- Ambiguous references

Notes:

Interesting article! A few weird things:

1. The most cited reference is to a site called "Techie + Gamers", which self-describes itself as "TechieGamers.com is a leading destination for engaging entertainment coverage, news, net worths and TV shows with a strong focus on Shark Tank." Makes me suspicious of the journalistic quality of this and that article.

2. In the headline it says "Texas AI centers guzzle 463 million gallons". Further down it says "According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle, data centers across Central Texas, including Microsoft and US Army Corps facilities in San Antonio, used a combined 463 million gallons of water in 2023 and 2024 alone, as reported by Techie + Gamers." Over 2023 and 2024? Odd that it's giving the sum over 2 years. And not sure what it means that it includes the US Army? Also without any context I don't know what this number means.

- I checked the TechieGamers article and this contradicts what is written there, which says the 463 million number is for San Antonio alone.

3. Robert Mace, executive director of The Meadows Center for Water, notes that "once water evaporates, it's gone." This is interesting, not sure how much water is actually evaporated vs returned to the grid.

4. "The scale of water use is massive, as the Texas Water Development Board projections estimate that data centers in the state will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, soaring to nearly 400 billion gallons by 2030, as per Techie + Gamers report. That’s about 7% of Texas’s total projected water use, according to the report." - Mixed citations here, not sure whether these numbers are from Texas Water Development Board or Techie + Gamers. Also they project an increase from ~232 million gallons/year in 2024 to 49 billion in 2025? That's a 200x increase. And they expect a further ~8x increase from 2025 to 2030 to 400 billion? Or is it because the original number was only for Central Texas?

- 7% of what? The 2025 number or the 2030 number?

- Again subtle contradictions with TechieGamer which says "a white paper submitted to the Texas Water Development Board projected that data centers in the state will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025. That number is expected to rise to 399 billion gallons by 2030, nearly 7% of the state’s total projected water use.". So it's not the Texas Water Development Board but a whitepaper submitted to the board? Not sure who made these numbers now.

5. "Much of the water these centers use evaporates during cooling and can’t be recycled, a critical issue in an area already grappling with scarce water resources, as reported by Techie + Gamers."

- Again really want more info/numbers on this.

The root article seems to be from "The Austin Chronicle" :

1. This starts with "After Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s public breakup, Sam Altman replaced Musk as the president’s new favorite tech guy. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has become something like Musk’s archnemesis on the rapidly developing stage of artificial intelligence in Texas." This doesn't seem accurate with my reading of the news, and is so colourful that it makes me question the journalistic quality of this article.

2. The reporting across the three sources is mixed on who they're blaming. Economic Times doesn't even mention OpenAI and calls it "Microsoft's Stargate campus". Techi Gamers uses this phrase, but also later says "Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI". And The Austin Chronicle doesn't mention Microsoft at all and focuses on OpenAI. And the Wikipedia page for Stargate says "joint venture created by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and investment firm MGX." ?

3. I take it back reading it further this article is _significantly_ better than the others, with many more reputable sources.

4. Finally we get some real sources!! The 49 billion 2025 and 400 billion 2030 numbers are from HARC, Houston Advanced Research Center. And the 7% is actually 6.6%, and relative to the 2030 projection.

5. Finally real info on evaporation!! Still no numbers but we get a description of the process:

> Most data centers use an evaporative cooling system, in which the servers’ heat is absorbed by water. The heat is then removed from the water through evaporation, causing the water to be lost as vapor in the air. The cooler water then goes back through the machines, and this loop is regularly topped off with fresh water. After all, evaporation renders the water saltier and unusable after four or five cycles. “Then they dump the water, and it goes down the sewer,” Mace said.

> ...

> The Abilene Stargate campus will reportedly use a closed-loop, non-evaporative liquid cooling system that requires an initial refill of around 1 million gallons of water, with “minor” maintenance refills. Cook is skeptical that such closed-loop systems will use as little water as they suggest. It’s not possible, Cook says, to use the same water over and over again, recycled infinitely, to cool servers.

6. This article doesn't mention the 463 mil anywhere, which makes me think that was original research from TechiGamers. They reference SAWS, San Antonio Water System, but again the numbers are without context, so would need to do some original research to get any meaningful insights from these numbers.

The odd thing is it never recovered; it's stayed low since 2020.

No it's from August 5th. It includes some nice graphs, apparently the punctuality really plummeted around 2020.

We are in agreement; I just think saying "lying" implies a level malintent that isn't present -- it's rather overly ungenerous. The poster is at worst incorrect. And their misconception is understandable given the company's own confusing marketing.

I think lying is a bit strong, I think they're potentially incorrect at worst.

The Cloudflare blog post where they announced this a few weeks ago stated "Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced it is now the first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default." [1]

I was also a bit confused by this wording and took it to mean Cloudflare was blocking AI traffic by default. What does it mean exactly?

Third party folks seemingly also interpreted it in the same way, eg The Verge reporting it with the title "Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default" [2]

I think what it actually means is that they'll offer new folks a default-enabled option to block ai traffic, so existing folks won't see any change. That aligns with text deeper in their blog post:

> Upon sign-up with Cloudflare, every new domain will now be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, giving customers the choice upfront to explicitly allow or deny AI crawlers access. This significant shift means that every new domain starts with the default of control, and eliminates the need for webpage owners to manually configure their settings to opt out. Customers can easily check their settings and enable crawling at any time if they want their content to be freely accessed.

Not sure what this looks like in practice, or whether existing customers will be notified of the new option or something. But I also wouldn't fault someone for misinterpreting the headlines; they were a bit misleading.

[1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/press-releases/2025/cloudfl...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/news/695501/cloudflare-block-ai-cra...