Water use in electricity generation is significant. In the England we are in the middle of a drought and it is surprising to realise that electricity generation uses 2.5x more ('environmentally extracted') water than public supply and 10x more than agriculture.

Rejection (or fear) of AI translating into rejection of the physical infrastructure that supports it is perfectly reasonable.

If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.

I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway.

The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.

I'm not disagreeing with you but peace is far more prosperous for humanity than blowing the worlds' retirement funds on datacentres-in-space as a military endeavour.

The 2000 crash left a lot of broken economies worldwide. Many non-US stock markets benefitted from the tech stock feeding frenzy without the investment actually being used to build anything.

If the AI bubble pops, a handful of US megacorps may be left with good models, datacentres and other assets, but the economic shocks will be felt around the world.

"The No Bullshit Guide to Math and Physics"

I have to work with ISO-purchased pdf documents that are heavily DRM-controlled. I can only open them on two PCs with a plugin that only works in Acrobat reader. It is so closed and unusable.

Anecdotally, doctors get things wrong quite frequently. Almost everybody has a bad medical diagnosis/advice story. The amount of reference material that a doctor needs to know off-hand and the data that they are given to make a diagnosis makes it a really difficult job. They also seldom have the ability to know whether their diagnosis/treatment worked, so have a limited ability to 'learn' from outcomes. (I did some work for cancer research and one of the most difficult problems was trying to get 'end of treatment' data because the end of treatment was often an unknown, to the researchers, death).

The ability to have a 'prompt' that includes lab data is likely to be better than the opinions of a doctor that only has one person's professional experience, limited ability to interpret 'prompts', and needing map it to an in-memory conditions database.

Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.

The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.

What is interesting to HN is that the police may have used AI summaries to determine the risk, and the AI/Search gave them the wrong information. Essentially they relied on Google or copilot (it is not clear which) to inform them of a riot at a match that didn't even take place. Police intelligence relying on public search and AI that is hallucinating is probably as common as it is worrying.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632140

Points: 2

# Comments: 1