cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Something that people need to understand is that AI companies (let’s talk about them instead of “AIs” that have no agency) are on a race to use less energy and less water per request for a very simple and selfish reason: it costs money.

    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.

    Underwater experiments in 2020

    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.

    Real world deployement in 2021

    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.



  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoAI@lemmy.mlAI Needs Your Help!
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    2 days ago

    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)?




  • 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…)










  • 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 :)






  • 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.)