54,451 karma · joined February 2, 2009
In his defense, this is written on his personal blog where (quite possibly) many readers already have some reason to trust his advice. And while I'm not sure what counts as appropriate credentials, on his linked HN bio (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bookofjoe) he claims to be a "Retired (38 years in practice) neurosurgical anesthesiologist". He also links to a lot of Google Scholar papers on medical topics for which he is a co-author.
(Oops, beaten by Dan, but I'll leave it up anyway. While I agree with Dan that you might have phrased it a bit better, I did think it was a fair question.)
First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in question used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.
Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be a useable pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.
But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.
That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?
I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.
To the flaggers: flag comments that you think violate the rules, but don't flag something just because you strongly disagree with the claim it makes.
For reference, did you mess this up yourself or did it require AI?
The Milk-and-Water School
Alas! she would not hear my prayer!
Yet it were rash to tear my hair;
Disfigured, I should be less fair.
She was unwise, I may say blind;
Once she was lovingly inclined;
Some circumstance has changed her mind.
The Strong-Minded or Matter-of-Fact School
Well! so my offer was no go!
She might do worse, I told her so;
She was a fool to answer "No".
However, things are as they stood;
Nor would I have her if I could,
For there are plenty more as good.
The Spasmodic or German School
Firebrands and Daggers! hope hath fled!
To atoms dash the doubly dead!
My brain is fire--my heart is lead!
Her soul is flint, and what am I?
Scorch'd by her fierce, relentless eye,
Nothingness is my destiny!
I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?
In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?
My problem with the article was that "patch" doesn't seem to add any useful information. Unless he was using a restrictive definition intending to exclude things like crossover cables (which still work), he could have just as well said "transfer files over a blue Ethernet cable" with equal precision.
If he meant to say that at this point in time "you can use _any_ ethernet cable to transfer files directly between two computers", I think it would have been better to say that rather than appearing to add a restriction on the type of cable required.
Traditionally (pre-2000?), one had to use a special "crossover cable" to do direct connections like this, but apparently modern Gigabit ethernet adapters are able to detect this situation automatically?
Hopefully you realize that it's not actually introspecting into its previous thought process, and instead it is just making up a plausible after-the-fact explanation that matches the format of similar explanations found in its training set?
I too often find these explanations enlightening, but please don't forget that you need to read all such responses as those of a pathologically lying psychopath desparate to trick you, not as a trusted expert who actually understands its internals.
I have a friend who is participating in this, and at one point he told me the numbers. My recollection is that maybe he said they were offering $2M CDN per year for 5 years? Or maybe it was $1M CDN for each of the next 5 years, with an option to renew for 5 more?
And I think there was something about a hardware budget, but I don't recall if that was included in the numbers are separate. In any case, while they are offering competitive salaries for Canada, the money offered is definitely not all going for the salary of just the recruited academics.
Here's a list of the states that require reformulated: https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/reformulated-gasoline
And here's a shorter list of those with areas requiring boutique formulations: https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/state-fuels
My belief is that all the rest only require the basic federal standard, which results in a map like this with a lot of states in gray: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67464
But if I'm wrong, I'd love to be corrected. What do you have for sources that support your assertion that "every state has their own gas"?
The thing I learned that surprised me was in the fine print of the one of the sample labels. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I hadn't realized that there was such as thing as Taiwanese grown cacao! https://damecacao.com/cacao-plantations-taiwan/
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote the opinion) is probably the smartest district court judge we have when it comes to technology, and one of the people I'd trust most to come up good decision.
He's a treasure, and my instinct is that he got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup
Because for the vast majority of the books, Google doesn't have the legal right to license those scans. It would be legal if the books were out of copyright, but despite the connotation of "rare books" those generally aren't the books we're talking about. Further, in the cases where Google didn't destroy the original of the book they scanned, their scanned copy may be considered infringing under the new standard, so Google doesn't want call undue attention to what they have.
Is it correct that Russian officially uses a semicolon (;) to separate time elements, or is this just a translation error?
> : (semicolon) for separating the elements of the time of the day (‘day’, ‘minute’, ‘minute and second’);
The example right below it seems to make clear that it's just an error, but then I wondered if the use of a regular colon (:) there was somehow the error instead.
What you are calling a loaf is actually a "slice". You might cut a loaf into 10 slices, each 10 cm x 10 cm x 2 cm thick. So you the question you are asking is how different people cut a "half slice" of 10 cm x 5 cm x 2 cm. I've never considered cutting a half slice the way you do it.
Personally, if I want a half slice, I would cut it the way you do for a full slice, and then afterward cut it in half while it is laying flat on the cutting board. Then I'd just leave the half slice sitting next to the uncut portion of the loaf.
I'd never cut a half slice the way you show in F, because I almost always want my slices to be the same thickness rather than tapering in thickness from one side to the other. While I wouldn't have cut it the way you do, I prefer your final result.
Abstract
Some organizations remain adaptable across centuries while others struggle to evolve and ultimately fade into irrelevance. Only a handful of theories can explain this extraordinary adaptability. We test two competing theoretical perspectives in imprinting research: Liability of aging suggests that older organizations are at greater risk of disruption by modern technologies, but older organizations can also repurpose their imprinted structures and processes to their advantage in a process termed exaptation. To resolve this contradiction, we analyze Catholic religious orders and their monasteries. They represent the oldest extant organizations, were founded in various historical eras, and are facing contemporary challenges posed by digitalization. Our quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that the orders with historically decentralized imprints show higher adaptability in embracing digital innovation. Our results confirm that long-term adaptability is increased in organizations whose imprinted decentralized logics provide a propensity for exaptation. However, these long-standing organizations are also more wary of the negative effects of digital disruption and appear to shield their organizational core more strongly. We contribute to imprinting research by shedding light on the intricate relationship between historically imprinted organizational logics and contemporary organizational practice and highlight the often-underappreciated importance of exaptation for long-term adaptability.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332...