elil17

Right, but it doesn't make sense to say they are evaporating a smaller percentage of the water.

Okay I feel like maybe I'm missing something. In a closed loop system, nothing evaporates. If you use an air cooled design, nothing evaporates.

If you use a hybrid design, you still evaporate ~80% of your cooling water - you just use less overall cooling water.

The water going back to the water cycle doesn't mean it's potable.

And yes, I do understand that it is a very small fraction of overall water use. I am actually in favor of using water where it will reduce electricity use. But let's not be inaccurate - the water used for cooling is absolutely evaporated or sent to sewage, with the exception of whatever sits inside the system's closed loop (which exists whether or not the system is cooled evap/dry/hybrid).

A little evaps? It's like 80%

Waste heat from data centers is significantly below the temperature that desalination systems typically use. While a desalination system could theoretically use data center waste heat, it would require far higher capital costs than other desalination systems.

Using water for cooling significantly reduces cooling energy use. The decision of whether to use dry, evaporative, or hybrid cooling approaches should be driven by the specific water availability in the area where the cooling process is to be used.

Many regions do have enough water to support evaporative cooling. When water is available, using it is prudent because it saves so much electricity.

Using surface water is not a practical approach for most cases because the process would need to be built next to a river or lake - there is limited industrial real estate in these areas.

Would support still jump if voters were told that cooling towers which don't use water need to use significantly more electricity instead?

People have always used a closed loop to move heat in and out of the data hall - but something has to keep that closed loop cool. That's often a cooling tower which uses evaporating water to reject heat into the air in a way that's very energy efficient.

Additionally, the power plants which supply electricity to the data centers have the same cooling problem. They also typically use cooling towers.

It's not dishonest at all. Datacenters and fossil fuel power plants are absolutely evaporating fresh water for cooling. The piece that's missing from that discussion is that it helps them use less electricity.

Well it is primarily evaporated into the air. It rains down somewhere, often over the ocean.

This refers to water that is evaporated for cooling of both the datacenters themselves and the power plants that give them electricity. The remaining water after evaporation is so full of minerals that it has to be discharged as sewage.

This evaporation process is used to cool the closed loop of fluid that actually moves heat in and out of the data halls.

Which is what exactly?

Is that this person though? If you actually look at his website there doesn't seem to be anything about transhumanism. Seems like he's just a metascience/science policy guy

This seems like a very un-culty varietal of effective altruism. Nothing to do with AI doom on his website

> moralizing vilification and resentment

Or genuine concern over their environmental impacts...

Many people in low income countries still lack every item on this list except for smallpox eradication and the sewing machine (indirectly, through imported second hand clothing).

One thing that I have found very interesting is reading what recipients of direct cash transfers do with the money: https://live.givedirectly.org

These are some of the worlds poorest people who get a transfer of several hundred to a thousand dollars via a charity called Give Directly. Although most of the money gets invested into business ventures, one interesting thing that comes up frequently is people buying straw mattresses for $20-30. The people who do this were frequently sleeping on hard dirt before getting the money.

It's not like Esperanto at all actually. To quote Wikipedia: "There is no consensus on what International Sign is exactly. It may either refer to the way strangers sign with each other when they lack a common sign language, or it can refer to a conventionalized form used by a group of people with regular contact."

Because iconicity (signs that look like what they mean - the sign language equivalent to onomatopoeia in spoken languages) is so common in sign languages, it's much easier for users of different languages to communicate. Something like 30% to 50% of vocabulary in sign languages is iconic, so it's much easier to guess at the meanings of words from someone else's language.

It's like if the delegates showed up to the first UN meeting and tried to communicate like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1vmqc2i/peppa...

Speakers are prioritizing words and grammar they think will be understood by their conversation partners. Then, over time, people started to standardize, and in some cases write down, which words were best used in that context.

>The dual screens on Pixel 11 Pro Fold are ideal for real-time translation, especially with our new sign-to-text feature. Developed in partnership with the Deaf community, it lets signers express themselves in Live Transcribe and Gboard in their native language.

That is big news if it's actually good enough to use. People have been trying to build sign-to-text and sign-to-speech systems for decades and they've never been usable.

That is big news if it's actually good enough to use. People have been trying to build sign-to-text and sign-to-speech systems for decades and they've never been usable.

The videos show it translating ASL as it's naturally used; without making the users adapt their signing to English grammar. That's a big leap forward.

It seems like they probably just ran recruitment ads targeted to people with an interest in gaming, right? The article actually doesn't say anything about how they went about recruiting gamers.

It uses location data to see if you're near an existing crash, but it uses AI to see if it's a motor vehicle accident call.

Additionally, using more water allows datacenters to be more energy efficient because evaporative cooling uses less energy than dry cooling. Datacenters outside of water stressed areas should absolutely being using water because doing so is better for the environment.

Prefer is a strong word. People are more likely to be fooled by shrinkflation than inflation. If they noticed they'd be just as unhappy.

He didn't win just because he said he'd fix the economy. Antisemitism and nationalism were part of his political platform from the beginning.

I think it's very important that people continue to recon with the fact that millions of Germans voted for Hilter and supported his rise to power despite because he wanted to enact antisemitic policies.

He also did a coup, so there's that.

Software patents are probably unenforceable in most cases, at least in the US and Europe, are essentially unenforceable. The European Patent Office, very sensibly, denies software patents.

The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:

1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.

2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.

3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.

4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.

I think that this person does not know what the Jevons Paradox is. The Jevons Paradox is that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used may increase the total amount of that resource that is used. Consuming more because costs went down isn't the Jevons paradox - it's spending more because costs went down.

So if you give all your coders a great test harness and they run more tests because it takes up less of their time, that's not the Jevons paradox. If you give your coders a great test harness and then they go from spending 10% of work hours on testing to spending 20% of work hours on testing because testing has such a good ROI now, that's the Jevons paradox.

Regardless of how impressive each are on their own, it just doesn't tell you anything about their comparative capabilities.

> How so?

Without looking at the specific changes made, it is impossible to know whether this represents a real capability improvement. For example, maybe the 20% gain was due to a very obvious/easy to catch inefficiency while the 1% improvement was due to something subtle.

The costs are pretty evenly split between: 1) Maintaining track 2) Buying/leasing/maintaining trains 3) Staff

The single best thing you can do to drive down train cost is to put more people on each train.

Based on these sources: https://www.statista.com/chart/20169/gb-rail-fare-spending-b...

https://transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download/f5c82d86-23...

Ideally making polluting activities more expensive would go hand in hand with reducing inequality - so people could still afford needs like going to a funeral. A great example of this is Canada's Carbon Fee & Dividend system.

This seems like a potentially important website but with the paywall and design issues it is hard to assess the quality.

The issue is that we are enabling people to travel long distances too cheaply.