Riskable

Indirect water consumption via electricity generation made up more than 80 percent of the datacenter’s overall water use

So 80% of this is total bullshit. Do we really care that data centers are causing mild increases in how much water a power plant is taking in from their local cooling ponds‽ That were built specifically for this purpose, so that potable water doesn’t get used.

The real issue with data centers is how much power they use! Talking about their water consumption is a pointless distraction. It’s a topic full of so much misinformation it just turns people away from the real problems once they realize it’s bullshit. “If the water use reported in the media is bullshit, maybe the rest of it is too?”

If you do that urine trouble!

I don’t have the answer, but I think everyone here is pining for that plant to survive.

Coin-operated elevators sounds like a libertarian paradise!

Oh gods. I leave them everywhere 🤷

If it’s part of a fingerprinting lib, then they just fucked it up. Because the fingerprinting can be done in one ~16ms window of time when the script runs and then you can break down the audio objects and pretend nothing happened.

Honestly, this doesn’t sound like spyware. More like absurd optimization. Here’s why: Audio devices often go to sleep (to save battery) and can take a second or two to wake up. That’s enough time that the end user will miss the first second or two of audio.

By keeping the audio outputting something (even if it’s just silence), they can guarantee that their little (often hilariously terrible) product videos will play the way they expect (which is loud and startling, of course!).

This is just one of those stupid tricks that’s bad for energy use but good for ignorant users who might complain that the first second of every AliExpress video is silent 🤷

The reason why I believe this to be the case is because there’s really nothing unique or interesting to be learned from an audio output loop that’s literally sending zeros through itself. If you wanted to use that to fingerprint a user, you wouldn’t need to keep it active. You could pass a single zero (silence) through and be done.

Perhaps I’m a bit weird, but things like this bother me in ways that nobody else seems to think about:

• The $180,000 is for the entire state. That’s nothing. I don’t know how many schools Kansas has, but let’s say it’s 100. That’s $1800 per school. Come on.
• Why can’t the school just ask some locals to build them some phone lockers? Just put out a school bulletin asking for some volunteers. I’m certain that in the entire state of Kansas they have plenty of companies and locals who would be willing to make the simplest of tiny, metal lockers.

They talk about these complicated technical solutions when all that’s necessary is a very thin, very small traditional locker. Make the kids bring their own lock! That’s what we did with lockers when I was in high school in the 90s.

Those old school steel lockers were certified for fire resistance, BTW. Not because they went through some special certification process, but because they were steel and painted with school-certified paint (which every school district already has plenty of).

It’s beyond “an arms race.” AI has become a commodity that’s everywhere and it’s being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.

At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.

I did the math and these are the approximate real numbers:

• US: ~30 million
• World: ~105 million

That’s active Linux desktops. That is, they’re being used to browse the Internet regularly enough to make it into StatCounter.