My Ninja coffee maker has a clock, nice little blue-green one. I set it maybe once and it is easy to do. But now I just let it show some completely wrong time because I don't need to time when my coffee will brew and I won't bother checking it for the time when I have like 20 other ways to find out
 

Yes. This.

Didn't someone already do that with the Doom map editor?

Then maybe just give up. Read a book or jerk off or something.

To think, there was a time before we took a hard turn into Idiocracy 2: Now With Stupid Nazis.

Not that things were all rainbows and unicorns. I remember the early 2000's and 1990's quite well. We were both optimistic that the Cold War was over and we wouldn't have to duck and cover. But also we were cynical or depressed about the state of news media, reporting, politics, and the general lack of interest from the public to improve anything. In a few short decades we went from spindoctors and talking heads to mango-fascism. How innocent we all once were.

Also, for about 1 year out of the 4 years of manual drafting I took in school, the exercises were mainly in decimal feet, so we measured tenths instead of inches. The rest it was all decimal inches and thousandths (thou) because we were drawing smaller things.

America is a strange land with strange customs. (an entire customary system!)

I was taught 1 ATM (bar) is 33 feet (of water). And 32 ft/sec^2 for gravity.

So much this..

Yes except, we are not talking about keeping ourselves warm in the winter, cool in the summer, the lights on in the ER etc... We are talking about power for AI data centers; not even data centers for "traditional" computer applications and software.

I'd be the last person here to argue we don't to develop energy infrastructure. I would agree that could maybe even should include nuclear fission at least in the form of modern much safer designs with real consideration for who bears the cost for the 'common defense' when a commercial entity is permitted to paint a giant target on a community.

Never the less this is a societal cross roads, where it comes to AI. The choice isn't massive unrestricted AI build out or mud hutts. We options spanning a range of carrying on like it 2016...damn the torpedoes restart EOL reactors and generating plants to feed the things.

Nuclear power plants (particularly 3rd gen and older) represent an enormous socialization of risk. Their really isn't any getting around that. Historically a rising tide has also lifted *most* ships. Even if it is not immediately clear and their are short term employment impacts etc, AI driven productivity probably will make most American's better off and a small subset with a lot if direct financial interested in things like restarting aging nuclear reactors more fabulously wealthy than they already are. So the question is does this "Promote the General Welfare" in net or not in terms of should regulators really go along with it.

The problem with Nuclear power is that it looks really good in the abstract sense but where it encounters reality it does not suit society so well.

Someone on here a few days ago pointed out that with something like 400 power stations and large industrial reactors there have only been three serious containment incidents.

I would say that isnt actually that good a track record given the cost of such calamity. Which really is unbound as far we know because it remains unclear what dealing with Chernobyl may still require as there is still fissile activity producing enough heat it could destabilze the surroundings, and all kinds of weird fungus that might be attacking the structure of the buildings, and Fukushima while it looks like we have handle on the ongoing clean up requirements, there can still be surprises. If scale the numbers of 2017-19 Chevbolt fires to 30 years you still have a rate of about 2 tenths of percent where spontaneous ignition would occur. GM still did a a recall and that only burns down your garage...

The other problem is the size and acute nature of catastrophe when it does happen. Yes you can prove with statistics coal plants release more radiation and kill more people one way or another. That's fine but they tend do it over decades at a rate society can absorb those costs. Even when a tail pond lets go or something we are usually looking at the loss of one town not a 1000+ sq miles. That is difference between one these 100 year floods and 500 year floods right there, in terms of social cost.

The picture for modern reactors does not change as much as Bill gates wants us to think because humans. Sure maybe it can't meltdown, maybe it can't produce hydrogen and create explosive conditions that will scatter materials on their own. But that does not mean some nut job shouting "Death to America" won't crash a jetliner into it, or execute some other kind of attack potentially spreading contaminates over 100s of miles. Remember you don't need a blast its the fire and the smoke that pump stuff high into the atmosphere where it can rain down later.

A Unitary Executive can do whatever he wants with the agencies he controls. Additionally, the President may take over agencies that are independent because "reasons".
That's the kind of top-down hierarchy that America voted for. They wanted this country ran like a business. They invested into Trump a position of not just President, but as America's CEO. With total authority over this country.

It violates established norms and the Constitution. But who voted for the Constitution, just throw it out now that one side got what they wanted. And the next step is to make sure the Dems never get back into power. Easy way is to invalidate all their elections as rigged, fraud, or illegal.

Some of the cult can be traced back to Lee Atwater, the Southern Strategy, and the Heritage Foundation.

Trump's disasterous presidency is more of a symptom of a deeper problem that is far older than a few decades.

The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.

At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?

The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).

I don't disagree with any of that. I see a lot of LLM and agents being thrown at problems we used to have much more tailored tools for that did at least as good a job, while consuming a tiny and by some comparisons almost immeasurably small amount of compute resources.

You're not wrong, Word 6 on a 486 with less than handful of megabytes of memory was able to perform grammar checking on word doc. Now you need 10s of gigs of primary storage, perhaps as much as 50 gigs of secondary storage between the model and the office suite. How much better a job it actually does is disputable. The experience is different, and a no-knowledge user can get started immediately. There is value there in both aspects. I don't see people who get paid access thru and employer etc to claude, gpt, etc stop using it or ignore it.

You're asking a deeper question though, how does that no-knowledge user become someone who understands the system when the system is getting bigger all the time and the short term incentives to learn anything about it get smaller smaller. I don't know. There is a lot of scifi on the subject, dated from before 2020, so thinking without being colored by recent economic interests, probably worth reading.

Right, so they only watch and report on the thought crime of writing about mass shooting. They would never report on anything else. This little privacy violation was for our own good and is really just the single exception. Glad we are safer, thanks Big Brother !