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flanked-evergl

744 karma · joined October 8, 2022

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flanked-evergl··on U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers
> That is straight up not true. Theres currently a threat due to the imprudently started war in the Middle East

The US does not use crude oil from the Gulf to generate electricity. The US could scale electricity production at least 100 times without needing to import anything from the Middle East.

> there will be more once rivers start drying up

Rivers will not be drying up because of data centers.

flanked-evergl··on U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers
> are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit?

yes.

flanked-evergl··on U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers
"The luddites were right" seems like an odd position to have on HN.
flanked-evergl··on U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers
> The threat to stable and affordable electricity and water supply

The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have

As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.

> The water, light and noise pollution?

The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.

> The threat to jobs?

CEOs saying they are laying people off because of AI is not the same as anyone losing their job because of AI, but even if that was the case, it's about as smart as not using an electric drill to save jobs.

> The threat to truth and transparency?

AI does not only not threaten truth and transparency, it makes it easier to find the truth and to circumvent transperency restrictions.

> The threat to privacy?

It's not.

flanked-evergl··on U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers
This degrowth anti-technology mindset just does not make sense to me, and I think it's mostly astroturfed from TikTok.
flanked-evergl··on The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?
> you're the one using the line "burning down institutions

No. I'm not. The post I responded to literally said: "By burning the institutions down", which is why I asked "Which institutions has Trump burned down?"

> Take the EPA for another example

EPA is not an institution, it's a regulatory body which is part of the executive branch of the US government.

Also very odd that you did not actually address my question: how much less was spent on "scientific funding" by the US government in 2025?

flanked-evergl··on The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?
Let's ignore the fact that congress and not the president that allocates funding, and the fact that "scientific funding" is not a recognized obligation or even right of any branch of the US government, and therefore hardly qualifies as an institution, and the fact that "scientific funding" included things like spending $14,000,000 to have monkeys play a "Price Is Right"-inspired video game[1].

Can you share exactly how much less was spent on "scientific funding" by the US government in 2025, and how exactly that amounts to Trump burning down the institutions?

[1]: https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/30/2025-festivus...

flanked-evergl··on The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?
Which institutions has Trump burned down?
flanked-evergl··on I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
This is about as intelligent as say "If I were 17, I'd learn digital electroinics". You would waste your time. Sure, in theory it's useful, in reality it's not that useful.
flanked-evergl··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
So the UN discovers morality by counting votes of government representatives of a bunch of countries for a document that was drafted without their input? And this somehow means it's representative of morality?

What relevance does the common ground between countries have to morality? How does the common ground between Turkey and Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Russia and Ukraine, North Korea and South Korea, China and Japan "discover" morality? Countries almost by definition don't have common ground, the closest they have is contested ground. People may have common ground, but it's somewhat fanciful to suggest that the representatives of the 18 countries who drafted the UDHR somehow was in any position to act as the moral representatives even for the 18 countries they represented.

They were some diplomats, probably all thoroughly immoral people if we somehow ever manage to figure out what the word moral actually meant, which I doubt.

Can you elaborate on this process as you understand it? I just can't quite wrap my head around this. To me, it seems that at best this process will result in something that exactly no person in the world would recognize as moral. A bit like Solomon's proposal to split the baby.

How do you define morality if you think the UN can discover it? Is there any way to check their work? Can I do a test to see if they made a mistake as I can with any other scientific disciple which discovers things about our world? Does their work make some prediction that we can actually check against reality to see if it's true or false?

flanked-evergl··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
> > What relevance does that have here, though?

> It is a moral statement, not a law.

How do you figure that? Does the UN define morality for all peoples in the world? Evidently not. What moral weight is added to some text if some governments of some countries have voted for it?

Not even the votes of the majority one people group in their national home define morality, so the votes of the UN General Assembly definitely does not define morality.

flanked-evergl··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
What relevance does that have here, though? Most countries that are actually signatories don't even adhere to it. The UN is totally feckless and hypocritical, and even if they were not, they are antidemocratic.
flanked-evergl··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
sorry, I was mistaken! I looked at https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/tree/2.0
flanked-evergl··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
The v2 branch of OpenCode has not been touched for months, if it's beeing developed then I don't know where.
flanked-evergl··on TSON – A JSON superset with immutable, hash-pinned schemas
If you need to embed the schema in the document, Don't design your schema in way that makes it impossible to embed the schema in the document.

[1]: https://json-schema.org/learn/miscellaneous-examples

flanked-evergl··on TSON – A JSON superset with immutable, hash-pinned schemas
why can't you use hash pinned schemas with existing json? Why do you need a new format for it?
flanked-evergl··on Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types
What makes these features unnecessary in 2024 but necessary in 2026?
flanked-evergl··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
I live in Norway. Starlink is cheaper than FTTH by a country mile. At the very least it's going to force down prices for fiber providers.

Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.

flanked-evergl··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
[flagged]
flanked-evergl··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
What is the future of this? Code is not the same as a viable open-source project with a community, contributors, advocates, users and funding, even if it's perfect code.

Even though I'm sure it won't be easy to convince the Postgres project to switch to Rust, I do think that trying would be time better spent.

flanked-evergl··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
We will keep using Claude because internal choices made by engineers and internal gatekeeping by engineers make everything else unfeasible, and going back on that would require said engineers to admit that they did something stupid, so it's not likely to happen.
flanked-evergl··on Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
Cop body slams a white man and then arrests him after he was assaulted by black people: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/uk-man-was-assaulted-by-atta...

Of course the black people were let go. After all, they did nothing wrong, they just assaulted a white guy.

flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
Does the article provide supporting evidence for your claim that "Even though GET+body is not handled the same everywhere, it's easier to make that the standard than it is to make a new syntax the standard."? Because if it does I don't see it. To me it just seems like a baseless claim.
flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
But it's not existing behaviour. It does not already exist. Breaking the semantics of something that exists means that things will work inconsistently. Breaking the semantics of get will also create compatibility issues.
flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
> Even though GET+body is not handled the same everywhere, it's easier to make that the standard than it is to make a new syntax the standard.

Is there some research or study that you base this claim on? What is the reasoning? Can you elaborate?

flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
The fact that some infrastructure is poorly maintained is not a reason against evolving protocols, it's a reason to maintain infrastructure better. It's really not that difficult to do.
flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
What does "some random third party" have to do with any of it? An SQL server can expose HTTP directly. SQL is not the only query language that exists.

SPARQL's standard protocol for sending Queries uses HTTP[1], and yes, of course it allows clients to define the query that it sends over HTTP. HTTP QUERY would be ideal for SPARQL queries. There are also many unprotected SPARQL endpoints that you can use without any authentication [2][3].

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-protocol/#query-operation

[2]: https://sparql.dblp.org/

[3]: https://data.europa.eu/en/about/sparql

flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
> For one you would never allow a client to dictate the query. That is a security and validation problem. So you have to deconstruct the query anyway and then rebuild it.

Every single SQL server allows a client to dictate the query. Furthermore, not all queries are SQL queries.

flanked-evergl··on OpenAI DayBreak – GPT-5.5-Cyber
Do you think that Anthropic's models would have been pulled if they did not say for months how their models is basically going to break the whole internet and that governments should most definitely restrict AI? I doubt it.

The problem is, though, given Anthropic have said all of that, they really have very little grounds for objecting to the US government's intervention here. Everything that the government would have to prove to justify their intervention has already been freely admitted by Anthropic, even though the "admission" was maybe more intended as a marketing ploy.

flanked-evergl··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
No, it does not feel like that.
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