zug_zug

The title seems to be accidentally confusing, the 17 billion is ALL evaporative.

If we want the other 80% (which I don't personally think we care about) 211 billion more.

Don't quote theoretical econ idealism at us when our actual electricity rates are going up 20% or more per year.

Increased demand absolutely DOES increase the cost both in theory and practice.

Datacenters have a readily available substitute to water if they just make less profit.

I'm not giving up my meat so that datacenters can use it for cooling, if that's what you're suggesting.

Yeah that's fair.

I haven't seen a single article doing that though (from either side) and I honestly think that nobody would even trust these companies at this point (Meta et al) to give an honest analysis anyways.

No I'm saying that water used in mining likely goes back into the ground.

Well the thing with the livestock is that you have to give a cow water.

Datacenters do not need water. It is just slightly cheaper for them than cooling with electricity.

Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption, and ideally in a way where it isn't a ghastly eyesore.

Good context, but aren't many of your examples simply putting that water back into the ground? Also, where the water is taken from is the key issue. If this was ocean water nobody would care, but if it's Reston, VA that's a local issue.

Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.

"consumed" means it was used for evaporated cooling and let off into the atmosphere. It's obviously a resource that replenishes, but wells replenish at a limited rate [and can run dry] so it's not a negligible issue.

Feel free to google this yourself, or ironically ask an AI, it'll happily confirm it's a real issue.

I agree with this and think that when your company isn't profitable and is running out of runway (due to the end of the zirp) and can't get more, moving toward features that more directly could land sales is a natural top-down move (and totally correct in the abstract).

However I still see a lot of "work theater" where directors couldn't care at all about changing the bottom line but just care that work that sounds plausible enough is executed in a predictable way that makes them look good (in fact they get pretty disappointed if something happens TOO fast [like half the estimate] as it illustrates they are out of touch the work they are claiming to represent). What I'm saying is that "do more top-down-product" in theory makes sense as a direction, but in practice I usually see it as wasted energy.

Well hopefully there’s a jury so this nonsense can get nullified

Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.

Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.

If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.

There's no "we take your word for it" that'll ever happen. Once you've proven you can't regulate yourself, that trust will never be regained with "trust us this time."

Unless they can come up with a system of independent review (e.g. public records visible to all of which cameras were used, when, and by whom), which let's be real -- they never would and I still wouldn't trust, then I'm on the side of whoever's breaking the cameras.

Maybe the takeaway is that the things we assume we really want aren't the things that make us happy. Okay living in our own perfect little apartment sounds ideal in our head, but a completely mundane risk-free modern life that is entirely regimented and has no interdependence, though comfortable, may lose us far more essential emotional pieces than it gains us.

(continuing this incredibly silly game for fun)

If they aren't invisible, my cat would have caught and killed dozens of them, and then I'd be smelling their rotting corpses around my house and slipping on their bodies.

Also presumably they'd end up in many pictures, which even if we somehow ignored them still in all photographs AI would still see, as would car lidar systems, etc.

(I guess the likelier theory is that a mushroom that causes hallucination is causing hallucination)

Well my broker (fidelity) requires certain degrees of experience and wealth before allowing certain types of risky trading. Perhaps sports-betting should fall under that category -- e.g. must be an accredited investor.

I don't really agree, moreover I haven't had the same experience at all.

I find engineers almost never using spreadsheets, ever for clearly tabular data. My coworkers certainly never use nested-ifs. Many times they will put a crappy table into jira instead, which multiple team members will be overwriting each other's work.

I think that piece is half right and half wrong.

I think it's largely correct that hiring bad engineers is dangerous to the company. But that's always been true, especially those "hack out a prototype, get director applause, and leave it for somebody else to own" people. But management has usually chosen to keep such people around, because they can look good on paper (see how many tickets they closed?).

The question is really a management / business-owner question -- will managers/directors stop hiring yolo-engineers? Will they empower engineers to close PRs simply on complexity/size grounds? Will they fund refactors and simplifications as first-class concern? If not, it will be a problem, and I don't envy the engineers who try to be the glue at such a company.

Building on this, as evidence:

If you have shop where you have the best product-owner in the world, and exact clarity on how you want to build something, how all failures are handled, all the tradeoffs, all the implementation details, all the risks, then product is simple, then your company absolutely can get away with hiring a less than top-tier engineer.

However if you're combining all of those skills/roles into one individual (a staff+ engineer) then of course it's going to be expensive.

Well, maybe you've been blessed with a better pool of juniors than the ones I've worked with. The ones I've worked with require exactly what an AI would require -- completely defined tickets with no ambiguity, lots of deliberate review, no guarantees that what they produce is bug-free.

At least with AI if it's not working out you just shut it off and it's done. If it's a person's livelihood that process takes a huge burden on all involved.

Really? Though the show initially showed some promise, I think I've found it disposable so far. I'd put it out there with Foundation, the LOTR remake, and so many others. I don't know if it even belongs in the category of things that started strong but lost their way (stranger things, severance).

My hill to die on is that you shouldn't start making a show, or a series, until you know how it'll all resolve (I'm looking at you George RR). And once you do you shouldn't extend it for any amount of money.

What am I reading here? A matrix fan-fiction? As far as I can tell this is something masquerading as something it's not.

Well, this can be interpreted as a reason to give up, but if it has any marginal improvement it can also be taken as a reason to try harder.

Imo it’s actually good to run large experiments like these.

Yeah that's a good point, in order to see a 10x gain it would require at minimum coding be 90% of your day [7 hours, 20min) (or somehow for AI to replace meetings)

I think given that 75% of americans are overweight and 40% is obese, certainly food would be a very reasonable first hypothesis of any neutral, objective scientist. I would be surprised if food you ate didn't affect energy levels, feelings of wellbeing, etc.

Well, good luck to them. If I'm on the jury and he argues "I got my passcodes confused" that's reasonable doubt for me.

No, you're being very dramatic. Lying to cops is very often your best strategy.

I doubt this person will be found guilty. They will be able to prove he wiped his phone, but it will be hard to prove he destroyed evidence.

I think people are aware that the government can physically do a lot of stuff, e.g. shoot you in the face for no reason. And vice-versa for that matter.

However there are arguments morally, and constitutionally, and logically, about what can be done.

Well maybe you should have a bit more hubris is in the face of science. You can power a lightbulb just by standing under certain high-voltage lines.

> A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful).

If that's all we want then that's trivial -- just make certain phones that don't have access to social media, or have whatever limitations enforced. And kids only get those phones. I don't think anybody's addicted to desktop social media.

This gets us the privacy and the protection at once.