dredmorbius

Wash: a few drops of detergent and hot water immediately after cooking. Let sit while I eat. Scrub out with a brush, invert to dry.

Wipe with oil (I prefer flax, there are many other options).

Store on lower oven rack when not in use, inverted. Seasons whilst baking generally.

Once a month or two, or when the finish is looking grotty, I'll give it a good oil rub all over, and park it in the oven at 230C / 450F for 60--90 minutes, and allow to cool for 30--60 minutes after (depending on whether I need to use the oven). Like new.

Teflon is the best it'll ever be the day you get it from the shop. Cast iron only improves with age. My oldest pan is ~70 years old (a family hand-me-down), the newest has a few decades on it. All will undoubtedly outlast me.

Otherwise that activity would be suspicious due to either a lack of recent records, or of presumably implausible future ones.

Generating data in advance and applying or updating timestamps later, on an ongoing basis, or when a duress code is entered is a possible way of mitigating this. There's the question of how convincing such data would have to be. White-flagging and generating (or appropriating from public sources, e.g., business or institutional entities) contacts for this might be a part of it. This is similar to but not entirely the same as data fuzzing, which is generally seen as applying to a primary data trail.

I don't either, but it's an extant one, and one in which we can collect a fair bit of largely-unbiased data reasonably immune to short-term manias, unlike, say, stock markets or technology hype cycles.

Over about 4 billion years, and under immense selective pressure, maxing out energy expenditure (biology's chief currency) at roughly 25% of the whole to information processing (input, storage, processing, output) seems to afford maximum benefit. It's also quite possible that genus homo's brain size has decreased over the past 200,000 years or so; h. sapiens neanderthalensis had slightly larger brains than modern h sapiens sapiens, though that size may not have been as intellectually or linguistically capable.

The other possibly interesting data series is of the magnitude of impact of information technology on social capabilities given rates of improvement of the former. Robert Solow, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". Computer capabilities have increased roughly 33 millions-fold since the 1950s, but productivity hasn't followed that same curve. Even looking at information technology spend vs. growth shows limited gains (computer capacity has become vastly cheaper over the same period, the same outlay buys far more capability than financial values would indicate). It seems likely that AI will follow a similar trend.

Though there've also been some marked transitions where capabilities have exceeded some limit or new applications / formats have become possible. Business computing beginning in the late 1950s, small businesses and universities by the 1970s, personal computing by the early 1980s, general networking in the 1990s, mobile devices in the aughts, algorithmic ad-tech / fin-tech / social media in the 2010s, and AI in the 2020s. There've also been capability-based advances including precision machining, automated equipment and systems controls, digital media (audio/video), accounting, navigation controls (marine, air, rail, land), re-usable rockets (largely from the ability to re-land boosters), massive satellite swarms, and LLM / gradient descent / synthetic annealing artificial intelligence. What the net societal and economic impacts will be isn't clear, and a fair bit of that is already clearly negative, as is the question of how those fruits will be distributed.

All of which affect the question of how big AI's energy footprint can grow. Though I'll note again it's growth rate and duration which matter, not present magnitude.

(Hope for clarity and accessibility that's both sufficiently nuanced and insufficiently verbose, though I've my doubts on the last.)

(Various methods: occasional use of un-blocked media, podcasts, being out-and-about and exposed to street ads, others' video / audio / streaming experiences, print, bars / restaurants / offices / gyms, etc.)

Browser fingerprinting / Panopticlick: <https://ssd.eff.org/module/what-fingerprinting> <https://panopticlick.org/>

On-device identifiers --- Google AdID (GAID), Apple IDFA, etc.: <https://developer.transmitsecurity.com/guides/risk/secure_de...> <https://geraguard.com/blog/how-device-fingerprinting-works-m...> <https://alejandrocordon.com/blog/2025/01/18/unique-identifie...>.

And again: it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve.

You're arguing against points I'm not making.

The point I am making is to keep an eye on the growth trend (and whatever might constrain that, you've given some credible concerns here), rather than the starting magnitude.

The question of how much societal resource information services can plausibly consume over a long term is an interesting one. Looking at biological analogues, the human brain accounts for roughly 25% of our own metabolic output, which I suspect is the present record.[1]

I get 8% for total present use in commercial computing, with the US EIA projecting a pretty steady growth to exceed all refrigeration, lighting, space cooling, and ventilation, by 2050, at about 350% of present levels. It looks as if that analysis presumes a 5% annual growth rate. The full report does incorporate AI in its considerations.

<https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564>

Specifically:

We assume AI servers will increasingly skew more energy intensive, the installed stock of AI servers grows exponentially through at least 2040, and computational efficiency will increase over time. In our High Electricity Demand case, we assume the exponential growth in AI servers will continue through 2050, and the rate of improvement in server computational efficiency will reflect historical trends.

Full report: <https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/narrative/>

Notes: ________________________________

1. Apparently among vertebrates typical metabolic fraction is between 2--8%, though there may be some tree shrews which approach humans as a percentage if not total CNS metabolic magnitude. "Ratio of central nervous system to body metabolism in vertebrates: Its constancy and functional basis" (1981) <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15916066_Ratio_of_c...>.

Socially, our computational energy is on the high side for vertebrate animals.

It's not clear that all of those objections are substantive or insurmountable.

"The USB port may have died" might be one possible response. (Not technically a lie, and hence defensible in court.) Or just silence.

Alternatively, some way of directing such probes to the decoy partition and presenting a sufficiently coherent impression of a valid partition might be another approach.

Much of this comes down to risks presented and costs of mitigation (or of getting mitigations wrong).

No.

If the trend continues.

Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.

What matters is that the growth rate continue.

Which of course, it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve (initially), or more complex longer-term dynamics.

The point of your infamous horse quote was less to show that the Earth would be covered in horses (or their effluvia), than that the observed current trend could not reasonably continue. And as some of us are aware, it didn't, due to the adoption of ... the petroleum-fueled automobile ... which has some bearing on this particular HN post itself.

Had the automobile not come along, or petroleum reserves proved much more limited as was widely believed at the time[1], large horse-congested cities such as London, New York, and Chicago would likely have seen sharply slowed or even reversed growth under negative hygiene pressures. It was the multiple factors of growth in fossil fuel use (displacing horses, and their effluvia), development of sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, food safety and purity, refrigeration, and public health which turned cities from death zones to attractive living places, rather than merely drawing desperate immigrants through high wages amidst rampant rural and foreign poverty.

But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.

2030 is three and a half years away. That's soon.

________________________________

Notes:

1. It wasn't until the 1930s with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in the US and of vast fields in Saudi Arabia that it seemed likely that oil was more than a short-term resource. In marked contrast to, say, the short-lived Indian natural gas boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom>. Daniel Yergin's The Prize is an excellent history of the industry's growth, though I disagree strongly with the author's strong allegiance to it.

It also states "Your comment would be fine without that ... bit."

I frequently address poorly-founded comments myself. Just did immediately before this reply, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49064763> (

I'm doing so both staying within the guidelines and specifically calling out the idiocy displayed, though without relying on that particular word.

Calling out Guidelines violations does not imply disagreement with what's been said otherwise. It is a call for more substantive participation, and probably strengthening your own arguments.

You've been here long enough that all of this should be quite familiar to you.

(I'm not a mod, which is why I'd initially linked a mod's own admonition.)

Aquifer fill rates are slow, and are generally predicated on large-scale flooding. Prior to modern flood control (dams, river channelisation, levee construction), in which much, and occasionally effectively all of California's Central Valley (as well as large riparian valley systems in Oregon and Washington) would flood.

See the Great Flood of 1862: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862>.

Reservoirs provide parlous slim protection against landslides of elevated slopes. Those are affected by upslope water saturation (the stuff that's on its way to fill your aquifers in coming months or years), not floodplain innundation. It's exacerbated by fire-cleared hillsides, particularly those which burn ferociously hot, killing plant roots and baking soil. Those fires are not historically typical, but have been the conditions experienced with greatly increased frequency since the 1990s.

Cattle don't graze chaparral, oak woodlands, or ponderosa or Douglas fir forests. Those have been what's been burning.

Your suggestions / assessments are at a far remove from reality.

(By analogy: <https://effectiviology.com/bikeshedding-law-of-triviality/>.)

That said, the hover/push feedback instantly reminded me of my own "Motherfucking Website" variant and the effects I give ordinary hyperlinks (an on-hover and on-click interaction, via CSS).

<https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB>

El Niño is the “warm phase” of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and features warmer than average ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.... Historically, the presence of El Niño conditions tilts the odds in favor of wetter than normal precipitation across the southern third of the state. The relationship between El Niño and cool season precipitation is weaker in the central and northern parts of the state.

Flooding is possible, particularly if dams exceed capacity, perhaps exacerbated by earlier snowmelt and peak runoff. Landslides are a more widespread, and less manageable problem, particularly as loose-material slopes are waterlogged. The deluge -> high growth -> heavy fuel load -> large wildfire -> landslide cycle is one that's become fairly well-known in California.

Levee failures within the Sacramento Delta or Central Valley could result in very large-scale flooding, affecting agriculture or communities.

The San Francisco Bay Area may see "king tides" and general flooding throughout the bay and delta region, particularly during December and January, and all the more so if high tides coincide with heavy river run-off. Remember that the entire Central Valley of California, nearly 500 miles long north-to-south, drains out through the Bay. Prevailing winds may create a wind setup or seiche which can result in flooding along a some but not all shorelines, or alternating across a body of water.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_setup>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche>

<https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/impacts-of-el-nino>

Those include: hydrology (floods, drought), sea-surface temperatures (hotter or cooler, both of which impact local ecologies and fisheries), storms (weaker hurricane season in the Atlantic, due to high-altitude wind shear, stronger in other areas), and others: economic, fisheries, military, human health, marine life, and specific regional impacts.

Those might be behavioural, cultural, environmental substances, information/media stressors, or others. More research is needed....

Firing off as part of a duress key entry, and removing itself (from the decoy partition) as its work is done, would suffice.

ADB / forensic tools would be ineffective if USB access is denied (as discussed elsewhere in this thread).

(See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048747>.)

Micropayments: no.

As I've said before: Micropayments have an absolutely unblemished three decade history of perfectly and precisely failing to work.

(Why? See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>.)

Alternative: an all-you-can-eat bundling option with a wide selection of publishers. We're already starting to see this with, e.g., commercial wireless / broadband plans, though largely limited to the major streaming platforms rather than news/journalism sources.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36838925>.

Seek out alternatives, usually local, FS/OSS, noncommercial, etc. Sometimes you might get burnt, but often it's quite the pleasant surprise.

And yes, every so often I find something that's good *despite its being heavily advertised.

However the UK does have its own GDPR regulation (see: <https://www.gov.uk/data-protection>), though my understanding is that it may be less strict in requiring equivalence between "accept" and "reject" actions. (I may be wrong on this.)

UK sites accessed from the EU would have to be under EU GDPR compliance.

Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend.

In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.

<https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...>

You'd have what appears to be a 128GB image (or some large fraction of that), which in reality is largely holes (typically: repeated blocks of ASCII 00 bytes).

Of course, you'd need to avoid actually trying to fill that filesystem.

An activity-generator might help address that.

(The Computer Weekly item was submitted but saw no significant discussion.)

There've been many treatments of this: Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), Neil Postman's Amusing OUrselves to Death (1985), Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909) <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.

That last is particularly good for a number of reasons, including that it's short and information dense, and lays out the clear conflicts inherent to advertising-driven media just at the time it was first gaining influence, and at a fraction of its present size and influence.

If you prefer video, media critic Isadore F. "I.F." Stone gave an excellent 1973 interview on the PBS series Day at Night on the state of newspaper journalism in the United States, contrasting the relative independence of big-city dailies vs. rural papers. The former were large enough that no single advertiser could threaten editorial independence.

Link will offer a choice of instances to redirect to: <https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g> (video).

Much as with some other widespread phenomena that come to mind, it's an observed trend the reverse of what might otherwise be expected.