cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
when/where are the “built for LLM inference” (😂) datacenters being built where water consumption is not an issue?
Did you even read the second part of my comment before getting mad?
yeah, i did. you wrote:
So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water
if you think it should be easy enough, what is your explanation for why datacenters are continuing to be built in locations where they’re competing with agriculture, other industries, and/or residential demand for scarce water resources (as you can read about in the links in my previous comment)?
Fuck I hate it when anything uses “water consumed” as a bad thing.
[…]
This water is not lost in any way, it’s just warmed up and evaporated. Which then falls as rain again.
oh, wow, yeah, evaporated water does fall again as rain 🤔
why didn’t anyone think of this before? so many wars could have been avoided!
finally, a hydrology understander has logged on to explain why water usage isn’t even a problem. thank you for clearing this up!
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)
usaid.gov
is serving a redirect to www.usaid.gov
which currently does not resolve.
The server isn’t exposed to the internet. It’s a local IMAP server.
if it is processing emails that originate from the internet, it is exposed to the internet
security updates are for cowards, amirite? 😂
seriously though, Debian 7 stopped receiving security updates a couple of years prior to the last time you rebooted, and there have been a lot of exploitable vulnerabilities fixed between then and now. do your family a favor and replace that mailserver!
From the 2006 modification times, i wonder: did you actually start off with a 3.1 (sarge) install and upgrade it to 7 (wheezy) and then stopped upgrading at some point? if so, personally i would be tempted to try continuing to upgrade it all the way to bookworm, just to marvel at debian stable’s stability… but only after moving its services to a fresh system :)
I asked this question the other day if I could somehow input my handwritten notes into programs like Trilium (or logseq whatever) and memos. OCR/HCR seems to far behind still so I am unsure.
I just left this comment on your post.
Via the pine64 blog update about their e-ink tablet TIL about inkput (using OnlineHTR) which appears to be a step in the right direction.
there is no provider on the planet that can freeze state of RAM in a way that would be useful for this
You are very mistaken, this is a well-supported feature in most modern virtualization environments.
Here are XenServer docs for it. And here is VMWare’s “high-frequency” snapshots page.
Sometimes, law enforcement authorities only need to contact cloud provider A when they have a warrant for (or, perhaps, no warrant but a mere request for) data about some user C who is indirectly using A via some cloud-hosted online service B.
A(mazon) will dutifully deliver to the authorities snapshots of all of B’s VMs, and then it is up to them if they limit themselves to looking for data about C… while the staff of company B can honestly say they have not received any requests from law enforcement. (sorry my best source on this at the moment is sadly trust me bro; I’ve heard from an AWS employee that the above scenario really actually does happen.)
Similar to this: https://github.com/alibahmanyar/breaklist
Relatedly, there was a company was selling a cloud(🤡)-based product called “Little Printer” from 2012 to 2014; after their backend predictably shut down, some fans of it recreated it as https://tinyprinter.club/ and later https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/
somehow input my handwritten notes
I’ve heard the reMarkable e-ink tablet’s cloud service has good-enough-to-be-usable handwriting recognition, but sadly I haven’t heard of anything free/libre and/or offline that is.
Brendan Howell’s The Screenless Office is “a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display. It is an artistic operating system.”
You can “read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input”.
weird, i wonder why. i just checked on an ubuntu 24.04 system to confirm it is there (and it is).
i guess your computer’s power button might not be supported (out of the box, at least) by Linux’s acpi implementation :(
I agree here; left to their own devices, money is generally what matters to for-profit companies. Which is why they are mostly continuing to build datacenters (including those that are primarily for “AI”) where they do, which is almost entirely in places where they are competing with others for scarce water: because the alternatives are even more expensive.
That’s a neat idea, and maybe will be widespread one day.
However that particular experimental project from Microsoft was conceived of in 2013, deployed in 2018, and concluded in 2020. Microsoft is not currently operating or planning to operate any more underwater datacenters: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/
Among things they’re doing instead (specifically for AI) is restarting a decommissioned nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a state with (like most states) a long history of conflict related to water scarcity and privatization.
This appears to be the only currently-operating (though the most recent news about it I can find is from 2023) underwater datacenter project, and it is in a certain country where it is somewhat easier for long-term environmental concerns to supersede capitalism’s profit motive. It would be great if they can make it an economically viable model which becomes commonplace, but until they do… datacenters today are still extremely thirsty.