https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1wauync/on_the...

A problem you’re not considering is that data centers, at least ones in current operation, consume mostly potable water, so you can’t compare agricultural use directly to data center usage. Doing some rough math:

Phoenix has about 150 data centers operational or planned. Let’s say 100 of those are operational. The average mid-sized data center uses 1.4 million liters / 0.37 million gallons of water per day for cooling servers. There is an additional 3x burden of water consumed to generate electricity. Let’s assume 70% of the data center water and 20% of the supplemental water consumed is potable [2]. We’re looking at 1.3 * 0.37 = 0.481 million gallons of potable water consumed per data center. So 100 * 365 * 0.481 = 17.5 billion gallons of potable water per year in the Phoenix region. That is a significant and growing fraction of the 110 billion gallons of potable water Phoenix produces per year.

These are using conservative estimates for potable water fraction.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/desert...

[2] In 2023, 78% of Google data centers’ water consumption was potable. See “Alternative water sources”, https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e...

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...

You have a keen and insightful understanding of honesty!

> When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology, we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed, because they do not accrue to the same people. On the one hand, it is well documented in the literature on environmental racism that the negative effects of climate change are reaching and impacting the world’s most marginalized communities first.

Please, please do the least bit of due diligence and understand the discourse before condescending to other people.

[1] https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

See https://claude.ai/share/6431ccd9-f4f8-4052-8996-b046d1ea1f76 for an example that I ran into just now.

For undergrad math, sure, and again, I think it's often because on some random corner of the internet someone else had a very similar misunderstanding. On the other hand, when I ask for clarifications on niche topics that have few examples on the internet LLMs (even Opus 5) often confidently cite irrelevant papers / results or simply hallucinate.

Hauling the pyramid blocks is what gives people intuition and understanding. It is true that school systems usually have way too much computation -- it is easier to test and grade computation. But the only way that you were able to use computer algebra systems fluently is because you had internalized how algebra worked by hand. If we tell students that they no longer need to learn how to solve equations we are seriously depriving them of a mathematical education.

Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.

For example, 50% of surfers were found to have insufficient vitamin D in one study. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17426097/

There are at least two possible conclusions that you could draw. One conclusion is that we all need vitamin D supplementation regardless of how much sun exposure we receive.

Another conclusion is that we might want to reevaluate what we consider the normal range to be, especially when we are deciding a range for a specific individual.

Functional data structures essentially create a proxy on every write. This can be inefficient if you make writes in batches, and you only need immutability between batches.