About the only things that stick are "don't stop physical and mental activity as you age" and "do stuff in moderation".

If you call it "intermittent fasting" and write a book about it, you can get a whole movement behind how healthy skipping breakfast and lunch is. And another movement preaching about how bad it is. And a followup book about what you REALLY should do ad nauseam.

It's both.

As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about.

You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists.

The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an unnecessary extreme.

It's like if the response to peanut allergies was a political group advocating for all peanut farmers to go to prison and an effort to extinct the peanut species. Real issue: insane response. (I couldn't mention any actual instances of this kind of behavior without attracting the discussion ruining attention of zealots, so, imaginary peanut situation)

once we have a bit more memory fab capacity and the insane bottomless investment in AI giants realizes there is a bottom, local hardware will catch up with model performance to the extent that centralized inference will be downgraded to special cases or for orgs that find it cheaper than buying expensive hardware

but really most power users are going to have 1 TB unified RAM and local models that will do well enough

for light office use you can still have a cheap laptop and a claude subscription

The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.

The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.

Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.

There is plenty of space for large systems which need a database but don't have a large number of clients.

It's a matter of the scale of your data vs. the scale of your readers and writers.

If you're complaining about resource usage, but only when that resource is being used by one thing you don't like, you're just a tool for somebody else's agenda.

Specifically, if someone ACTUALLY cared about foolish uses of freshwater, they'd be advocating for reforms in water rights that result in growing extremely water-inefficient crops in semi-arid and desert environments. Mostly almonds and alfalfa, especially when these are for export.

One would also make the distinction of where the water came from important. Some places are flush with fresh water and its usage isn't terribly important, other places are deserts.

Anyway there should just be a "sin tax" for using freshwater for frivolous things like golf courses in the desert and datacenters who don't want to invest in less wasteful cooling solutions.

This indeed pollutes the code with a bunch of nonsense. One of the things I have it maintain instead is a "findings" document with lessons learned and such.

Real estate is too expensive and rent is too high and people don't want to raise a family in a tiny apartment where both people have to work long hours. Combined with the fear TV sold to people such that they have to hover over their children 24/7 for most of their lives.

I think the best path is helping nature along to be the best that it can be naturally. There's a bunch of artificial gardening which would never sustain itself that ought to be avoided because it only looks like you're doing something worthwhile.

I'd highly suggest reading up on different keystone species for creating year round food sources for your local ecosystem with native plants and help nature along a little with a light touch.

There is quite a bit of distance between the exactness of any human language and an sort of programming languages. When you have a language model loaded with software engineering best practices you do not need the exactness of a programming language to describe desired behavior.

Hardware documentation is indeed often lacking in plenty of ways but in a world where writing your own software through agents is commonplace, the hardware manufacturers (or the community) would make testing that documentation to find the problems an important part of hardware development.

Software as a list of requirements and that's it. The local LLM appliance everybody has taking in a document specifying hardware, interfaces, and requirements and spitting out software changeable locally via conversation with its users.

In the same way you have a cookbook with recipes to make dinner instead of ordering out.

I'm tired of people in power whining about being victims.

You absolutely can blame the goalie for failing to defend the goal.