This company has no name, huh? womp womp

Boeing was ruined by replacing engineers in leadership with bean counters. womp womp

lol anti-DEI whistleblowers.

You're hilarious.

Well, some of it is...

People keep telling me that religious people have done a lot of science, that the catholics were the main force in science at one point, blah blah blah. But they won't report not finding god because they all either think they have found him already or want to keep the scam running.

First define they and us.

I don't really believe FTL is possible, but with that said, I also don't absolutely rule it out since history is full of misunderstandings about physics.

Yes, he has been. But it's not trivial to make it go away. A lot of people are involved and it's hard not to leave tracks. He can't Epstein everyone.

I miss Toxic Skies... which last ran on 1.8. There used to be a few servers.

DEI is decency. It's only made political by people who oppose decency politically.

Your post appears to have been written by an AI - you appear to have pasted my post into an AI and asked it "write a rebuttal". Unlike with the other (human) poster, I will not respond until you own up to it.

You yourself clearly don't even believe what you're writing. You keep getting mad at the claim that AI isn't (present tense) a large chunk of data centre power usage and pushing back against it, but then trying to counter that by talking about growth trends. Either you yourself (A) understand the fact that AI *isn't* where most datacentre power is used and are pointing at trends as a distraction, or (B) you don't understand the difference between a fraction and a growth trend.

Your own citations furthermore undercut your own claims.

From 2005 to 2017, the amount of electricity going to data centers remained quite flat thanks to increases in efficiency, despite the construction of armies of new data centers to serve the rise of cloud-based online services, from Facebook to Netflix. In 2017, AI began to change everything

No, it didn't. Datacentre usage started spiking in 2017, long before AI was any sort of meaningful "thing". GPT 2 came out in 2019, and that's a mere 1,5B parameter model (you can train it today for about $10). Even with much worse hardware and software performance at the time, the energy needed to train it and other AI models at the time was utterly immeasurable compared to other server needs. Server power usage was spiking and AI had nothing to do with it. It was spiking because of Bitcoin.

Yes, AI has been on an exponential growth trend. You love to fast foward trends into some questionable future, while forgetting that rewinding an exponential trend makes it rapidly diminish toward irrelevance. AI power consumption TODAY is about 40TWh/yr, vs. Bitcoin alone at 155-172 TWh per year. Since AI is growing faster than Bitcoin, that already extreme ratio in favour of Bitcoin (and other crypto) becomes far more dramatic in the past. It's also not just crypto that was pushing the post-2017 data centre growth trend, mind you, even just general cloud services have been exploding in demand since then.

If you don't like their terminology, let's say "consumer AI" to avoid the technical distinction of what is or isn't a generative model.

But that's always how things work. Consumer purchases drive the advancement of new tech, and that new tech gets applied more broadly. EVs didn't create the market for the li-ion batteries that powered then - consumers buying laptops and cell phones and toys with li-ion batteries created the market for li-ion batteries, and then EVs took advantage of that market (now they drive it, but that's not how it got established. You simply cannot divorce the usages; they're inexorably linked.

Nor can you simply write off consumer usages, because again, as I noted, they're driving productivity. And productivity includes the development of software and systems that are more efficient than older software and systems. Just the other day Slashdot was all talking about an AI agent that caused a stir when it submitted a patch to matplotlib and then wrote a blog post when its patch was rejected because it wasn't human. Do you remember what that patch was? It improved performance by ~30% by switching to contiguous memory ops. This is happening all over the economy (just usually with far less drama than that).

Your response begins not by engaging the substance of the report, but by questioning whether I read it and by attacking the credibility of the authors.

Key words: "Began with". Yes, the authors' background absolutely does need to be mentioned; they're not even close to an unbiased source that should just be taken at face value. But my post only began with that; it then went into great detail about the content of their "report".

The whole point of their existence is to get things other people don't because they're special.

Fuck me, another person who doesn't know how tariffs work.

The biggest relevant factor back then was that state militias were a huge part of the military capacity of the US. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State", was absolutely true in the then-existing military structure. The militia structure still exists; it is now known as the National Guard. Also, back then, individuals were responsible for bringing their own weapons (and doing their own training); today, the National Guard itself provides the weapons and the training. A modern rendering would be: "A well regulated National Guard, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the Guard to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

Even that isn't quite correct, because the Guard's role has changed. On one hand, it is now much less significant of a military force than it was back then. On the other hand, the Guard was a tool of state power back then; the amendment was also devolving some martial power to the nation to the states (whereas today state guards can be federalized without the consent of the state).

A lot of 2nd Amendment fans today seem to think it was intended as some sort of Jeffersonian "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" eternal-fight doctrine. But while that certainly was Jefferson's view that you're going to need regular revolutions and should empower them, it was not some general doctrine of the constitutional convention, and it was absolutely not what they codified into the US constitution. They absolutely could have used Jefferson's "armed revolution" notions as justification, and explicitly chose not to. They chose empowering the (now National Guard) to be a potent state-run military force as a justification.

Also, early on, interpretation of the Second Amendment was much more lax than it is today. For example, bans on sword canes, dirks, bowie knives, and concealed pistols. Aymette v. State (1840) explicitly ruled that the 2nd Amendment only applied for the "common defence" (militia purposes), and thus only covered protected arms "usually employed in civilized warfare". State v. Reid and State v. Mitchell also took similar positions. There was one early outlier - Bliss v. Commonwealth - but it was so unpopular among the public that Kentucky passed a constitutional amendment banning concealed arms.

I don't believe that anyone in leadership at NASA was chosen for DEI reasons, but I could easily believe some were chosen for political reasons.

Did you forget that the NSA sits on 0-days so that they can exploit them?

I'd have laughed right in her face, involuntarily.