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MightBeAlpharius

@ MightBeAlpharius @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
47
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Sam Altman would like remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too | TechCrunch

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  • Okay, so I'm not a big AI guy. It kind of sucks at everything we try to do with it, and it's basically a huge waste of resources right now.

    But... Sometimes it's fun to play devil's advocate.

    AI consumes shitloads of electricity and water, and produces nothing but slop. Even if they're not using evaporative cooling, that water use impacts the availability of usable water downstream of the data center. Also, it's a huge money pit - last I saw, AI companies weren't really turning a profit.

    The article addresses electricity (Altman specifically called out a pivot to nuclear, wind, and solar), but doesn't say a ton about the other issues... Which could all be addressed with coastal data centers.

    Don't worry - I'm not about to suggest hearing the ocean up to cool data centers. Instead, why not pivot back to evaporative cooling, but with seawater?

    Build the data center, and put some cooling pools around it - twelve seems like a good number. Make the pools big enough that the center can be cooled without the use of all of the pools (this is important). Heat sinks are made of metal, and saltwater is bad for most metals, so slap on a few sacrificial anodes like they're metal-hulled boats. Boom - the data center is now cooled using non-potable water without warming the ocean.

    Now, as water evaporates, salt deposits will form in the cooling pools. When a pool gets too salty, it can be drained (or allowed to fully evaporate), and the salt can be knocked off and collected. Boom - losses reduced, data center is now a salt farm. Salt's not really worth much, but it could probably be marked up and sold to tech bros as fancy "AI powered sea salt."

    And then, once we've done that, we can train the AI to do something useful, like... Uh... Clean it's own salt pools with a little robot, I guess; it kind of sucks at everything important.

  • Yes this year is going to be really good and productive

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  • That's why you try to line up the new job before you quit - they can't talk shit about you quitting on short notice if you're still there.

    I actually tried to give two weeks at my old job - they didn't deserve it, but I figured I should. The application for my new job even had a checkbox labeled "I am currently employed and will need two weeks notice of my first shift."

    Instead, they called me on a monday and asked "can you start next monday?"

    ...My boss wasn't in that day, and I really wanted a weekend before starting my new job; so on Tuesday, they found out that Friday was my last day.

  • Retro StarCraft prizes

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  • So, related story...

    Back in 2011ish, I discovered SilkRoad. I'd heard about people ordering weed on the internet, and it sounded really convenient. I downloaded Tor, I trawled forums and #chans for onion links, and eventually, I found it. Aside from all of the sketchy shit (hard drugs, stolen credit card info, home vasectomy kits), it almost seemed too good to be true - I could order a whole pound for what I was paying for a couple of ounces.

    There was one problem, though: payment. You couldn't use your debit card (obviously), and you couldn't just buy a prepaid visa and use that. No, they handled all payments in this weird new thing that I'd never heard of... Bitcoin. I did a bit of research, and it seemed like it would be kind of a hassle to set up a wallet and find an exchange and actually buy any Bitcoins, and even more of a hassle to sell any extra Bitcoins that I had left over. On top of that, the price kept bouncing around, so enough Bitcoin to buy a fat sack of weed today might buy a much smaller sack tomorrow.

    So what did I do?

    I gave up and kept buying weed from a dude. If I'd sucked it up and dealt with the hassle to buy weed by the quarter pound instead of the quarter ounce, the crumbs left in my Bitcoin wallet could have bought me a house.

  • Full tank

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  • IIRC, the guage running from "very nearly empty" to "almost full" is an intentional thing, weirdly enough.

    On the upper end, it's because supposedly people feel better if they fill the tank and the needle doesn't start going down immediately.

    On the lower end, it's to give people an earlier warning that their tank is (very nearly) empty, so they don't run out of gas on the road.

  • Apple (SMBC)

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  • Gonna come at this from kind of a scholarly angle here... Yes. Yes absolutely.

    And just for fun, I'll use the Bible to argue in your favor.

    You raise the point that even the New Testament (the half that pivots from "follow these rules" to "don't be a douche") shouldn't be taken literally. Some might argue that that's the only part that should be taken literally, but let's take a look at how Jesus chooses to illustrate that message: by doing miracles and relating parables. He's not regaling crowds with true tales of history, he's telling them made-up stories to convey a point about morals.

    Hm... Made-up stories to convey a point about morals...

    Stories, perhaps, like someone turning into a pillar of salt because they chose to dwell on the past instead of moving on? Or about the value of perseverance and solidarity in the face of continued adversity? Not giving up hope, even when you've lost everything? How murder is just straight up bad?

    Lot's Wife, Moses & the Pharaoh, the entire book of Job, Cain & Abel; all from the Old Testament, and all far less believable than the Good Samaritan... But somehow, those stories are to be taken as truth, while a story about a nice guy existing in Samaria is an allegory for the goodness in all of us? It's all parables, all the way down. The New Testament is just parable-ception - it's a made-up (or at least, very heavily embellished) story about a nice guy who tells stories about nice guys.

  • I need to vent about plastic milk jugs

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  • Pretty sure it's mostly an American thing, but I'm not well-travelled enough to be sure.

    And as for rate of consumption... When I was a kid, my parents made me drink a glass of milk every day - call that 8oz, so 56oz per week. That's a little under a half gallon (which you can also buy in plastic jugs), not including other uses like tea/coffee and cereal. Altogether, we'd go through about a gallon per week.

  • ICE seeking to turn industrial warehouses into additional detention centers through private detention companies for migrants being staged for deportation

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  • I mean, they could just turn one of the warehouses into a big communal shower, and that would...

    Oh.

    Wait.

    Oh no

  • Sleep in Hea-Venn-ly peace

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  • He sees you when you're sleeping,

    In comforts soft embrace.

    He comes right up to your bedside

    And drags his balls across your face.

    So, you'd better not pout, you'd better not cry,

    You'd better watch out, I'm telling you why,

    Santa Claus is coming to town!

  • Please let me know

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  • Y'all are getting an hour for your meal break? I've never had a job that gave us more than 30 minutes...

  • Poets are now cybersecurity threats: Researchers used 'adversarial poetry' to trick AI into ignoring its safety guard rails and it worked 62% of the time

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  • I'm not familiar with Worm, but... We're doing a great job of mashing up the bad parts of a lot of sci-fi lore and backstory.

    Twelve Monkeys? Yeah, we had a poorly managed pandemic.

    Star Trek? We're struggling with income inequality and experiencing difficult political times right around when the Bell Riots would have started for similar (but worse) reasons.

    40k? AI was great, right up until it wasn't. They crammed that shit into everything before the Men of Iron rebelled, and that was real AI. We might actually speed-run that bit, since we're doing such a good job of messing things up with LLMs.

    On the one hand, I know that the world resembles those things because they were inspired by real life - epidemics, economic strife, and an increasing reliance on systems that the average person doesn't understand. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with a privately-funded Mars colony that ultimately replaces one of Mars' moons with a gaping hellmouth.

  • You will love this Negroni that tastes like spaghetti

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  • Yeah, lacking an amaro, I feel like it might be a touch unbalanced.

    That said, you could probably make a toned-down version at home. My wife commented recently that Dolin vermouth has some notes that are reminiscent of tomatoes, and they definitely show through when I make negronis with it. Gin, Campari, and Dolin, with the herbal garnish from this instead of an orange peel might work pretty well!

  • Why do seemingly all politicians (and no one else) do that hand gesture when they talk, the one where it looks like they're holding an invisible fishing rod?

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  • It's more of a public speaker thing than just a politician thing, but... Well, politicians are all public speakers, so it makes sense that that's the context you've seen it in.

    It's literally a practiced gesture - public speaking makes use of some gestures that telegraph well to crowds, but seem unusual otherwise. IIRC, that fishing rod grip is an alternative to gesturing with a fist - it looks less aggressive, but gets the point across.

  • bit nieche

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  • Holy shit, I learned something from Lemmy Shitpost!

    Honestly though, one of these has been draped over a fence in my neighborhood for like a week, and I've been wondering what it was.

  • I only managed to produce one paper in 6 months of research. How do I survive?

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  • I had a military history professor, and he felt the same way. He opened his entry level classes with a speech that amounted to "nobody should be here because they want to work in military history. ROTC kids and military buffs only; all you can do with what this class covers is teach this class, and this lecture hall has as many students in it as there are jobs in this field."

  • U.S. House Speaker calls Portland naked bike ride [protest] ‘most threatening thing I’ve seen yet’

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  • all those chilly willies

    Yeah, I heard the weather was pretty bad this year. Ngl, though, I feel feel like my fragile sense of masculinity would be much more threatened by a bunch of massive flopping songs on a hot day, than it would be by a bunch of tiny chilly willies on a cold day.

    ...Hold up. Poor/middle class guys with small schlongs drive huge trucks and loud cars. Does this mean that rich guys with tiny tallywhackers go into politics?

  • Feeling Stuck

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  • I mean... Honestly, I could probably afford it better now: the insurance at my old job suuuuuucked, and barely covered any of it. I've got slightly better insurance now, and noticeably better pay, so affording therapy wouldn't be an issue. It's also definitely a good idea - I've been toying with the idea of going back, since it's been helpful to me in the past.

    The issue would just be figuring out what to tell my wife. I don't really want to tell her that I'm going back to therapy because of how it ended up last time; but I doubt that "oh, sorry I wasn't available for the past hour, the reason why is none of your business" would lead to a less severe reaction.

  • I do love a good strudel

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  • Yeah, ngl, I'm kinda curious about the strudel now.

    Like, if it's good, cool - now I have someone else's old family recipe for strudel, the origins of which I will refuse to elaborate on.

    But if it's bad, then it's hilarious that they wrote a fluff piece on the Goebbels family, but included a recipe that would make people hate them again. "This strudel is shit! Fuck this magazine, fuck Goebbels, and fuck this terrible dessert!"

  • Feeling Stuck

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  • Not as such, no. In a lot of ways, she's a great person, and I do genuinely want to be with her... But damn, she's absolutely terrible at judging how her actions will affect others.

    My tale is also lacking a bit of context: she's mildly immunocompromised, and she moved back with her (much more immunocompromised) family in 2020 to take care of them through the pandemic. I spent that year living completely alone... And, with nothing but myself and my shit-ass job, I was honestly doing worse than ever.

    When she moved back in 2021, she did a lot to help me. In fact, she's actually the one that suggested that I try therapy, and it really did help a lot. She encouraged me to apply for jobs again, and supported me through a bunch of rejections... Honestly, at the time, the only thing that I would have complained about to my therapist was how six months into therapy, she started assuming that I had been complaining about her the whole time.

    And to be really honest, if it weren't for that, I don't think I'd be saying all of this right now. She pushed me away from therapy because she felt nervous and insecure, but if I'd stayed in therapy, I would have had someone to talk to about the whole cat situation. Instead, I took the easy way out and dropped therapy, which left me feeling kind of isolated when we adopted and gave up the cat... And that just kind of snowballed.

  • Off My Chest @lemmy.world
    MightBeAlpharius @lemmy.world

    Feeling Stuck

  • Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??

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  • Yeahhhh... I took a class on the history of the Bible, but that was about a decade ago, so I'm spotty on some of the details. Thanks for fleshing it out, though - I knew my take was probably missing something!

  • Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??

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  • It's because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

    That might be a bit oversimplified, but that's really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.