Okay, so I’m not a big AI guy. It kind of sucks at everything we try to do with it, and it’s basically a huge waste of resources right now.

But… Sometimes it’s fun to play devil’s advocate.

AI consumes shitloads of electricity and water, and produces nothing but slop. Even if they’re not using evaporative cooling, that water use impacts the availability of usable water downstream of the data center. Also, it’s a huge money pit - last I saw, AI companies weren’t really turning a profit.

The article addresses electricity (Altman specifically called out a pivot to nuclear, wind, and solar), but doesn’t say a ton about the other issues… Which could all be addressed with coastal data centers.

Don’t worry - I’m not about to suggest hearing the ocean up to cool data centers. Instead, why not pivot back to evaporative cooling, but with seawater?

Build the data center, and put some cooling pools around it - twelve seems like a good number. Make the pools big enough that the center can be cooled without the use of all of the pools (this is important). Heat sinks are made of metal, and saltwater is bad for most metals, so slap on a few sacrificial anodes like they’re metal-hulled boats. Boom - the data center is now cooled using non-potable water without warming the ocean.

Now, as water evaporates, salt deposits will form in the cooling pools. When a pool gets too salty, it can be drained (or allowed to fully evaporate), and the salt can be knocked off and collected. Boom - losses reduced, data center is now a salt farm. Salt’s not really worth much, but it could probably be marked up and sold to tech bros as fancy “AI powered sea salt.”

And then, once we’ve done that, we can train the AI to do something useful, like… Uh… Clean it’s own salt pools with a little robot, I guess; it kind of sucks at everything important.

Yeah, lacking an amaro, I feel like it might be a touch unbalanced.

That said, you could probably make a toned-down version at home. My wife commented recently that Dolin vermouth has some notes that are reminiscent of tomatoes, and they definitely show through when I make negronis with it. Gin, Campari, and Dolin, with the herbal garnish from this instead of an orange peel might work pretty well!

It’s more of a public speaker thing than just a politician thing, but… Well, politicians are all public speakers, so it makes sense that that’s the context you’ve seen it in.

It’s literally a practiced gesture - public speaking makes use of some gestures that telegraph well to crowds, but seem unusual otherwise. IIRC, that fishing rod grip is an alternative to gesturing with a fist - it looks less aggressive, but gets the point across.

all those chilly willies

Yeah, I heard the weather was pretty bad this year. Ngl, though, I feel feel like my fragile sense of masculinity would be much more threatened by a bunch of massive flopping songs on a hot day, than it would be by a bunch of tiny chilly willies on a cold day.

…Hold up. Poor/middle class guys with small schlongs drive huge trucks and loud cars. Does this mean that rich guys with tiny tallywhackers go into politics?

Yeahhhh… I took a class on the history of the Bible, but that was about a decade ago, so I’m spotty on some of the details. Thanks for fleshing it out, though - I knew my take was probably missing something!

It’s because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

That might be a bit oversimplified, but that’s really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.

So, uh… We have the same thermostat at my job. It’s not great. You can’t just tell it what temperature you want the room to be, you actually have to tell it if you want it to heat or cool to that temperature.

Yours is set set to 65, but if you look to the left of the current temp, it says “heat.” Someone likely forgot to change that when the weather warmed up. IIRC, one of the three unlabeled middle buttons will fix that.

Actually though, can we get some malicious compliance? Schools banning the Bible based on rules written by Christian conservatives would be hilarious.

“We have considered several excerpts, and deemed this book unfit for schools. The book opens with everybody naked, and goes on to feature violence on a massive scale, as well as some weird incest, and a man who collected two hundred foreskins. Frankly, we believe that this book should have never been on the shelves here at Li’l Tykes Elementary.”

I’ve never had an induction stove, but I grew up with an electric stove - IIRC, it was on a separate fuse from the rest of the kitchen, and it had a weird plug because it needed a different voltage than most other appliances.

I would assume the requirements for an induction stove are more or less the same… Switching from regular electric to induction would probably be easy, but gas to induction would take a lot more work.

I never really thought about their succession of consoles, but to me, seeing them listed like that feels surprisingly additive.

Like, the N64 had analog sticks, and the Gameboy was portable… And people liked both of those, so they released the GameCube, which had analog sticks and a handle, so you could take it to your friend’s house. They followed up with the DS’ touchscreen and the Wii’s motion controls, and when people liked those too, they bundled all of that into the Switch: it has analog sticks, a touchscreen, and motion controls; it’s a handheld and a very portable plug-in console.

But, as they’ve done that, they’ve always pushed the limits of what they could do. As it stands, there’s not much that can be added to the Switch, so they’re releasing an improved version - like they did with the Gameboys Color, Advance, and SP. Essentially, the limiting factor isn’t Nintendo’s ability to innovate, but rather the technology available to them.

Give it a few years for other aspects of technology to advance, and I’m sure they’ll start pushing the envelope again. They’ll probably wait until they can pack an entire console into a VR headset without a bulky battery pack, then release it with something wacky like a charging dock with a built-in projector, or something crazy like that.

I grew up rural too, but in a less conservative area, and… Honestly, it made for some hilarious moments in sex ed.

I think the crowning moment was in high school health class - at the start of the sex ed unit, they split us up by gender, and had both groups try to draw both reproductive systems as a baseline for what we knew. Both groups did pretry well with the male stuff, but there was a stark (and unexpected) difference in the diagrams of the female reproductive system:

The girls group did an excellent job of drawing and labeling a vagina, but almost none of the internal bits.

The boys group, though… One dude had noticed something about the general shape of female reproductive system in an earlier class, and came up with a his own mnemonic for it: turns out, you can sketch oit the general layout of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and birth canal pretty neatly over the dodge ram logo.

They also usually use some weasel words like “up to.” That way, if it doesn’t last the full 72 hours (which it won’t), they can claim that they stated “72 hours MAXIMUM” rather than just “72 hours.” It’s basically shifts the statement from “lasts three days” to “definitely won’t last four days.”

If you’re into hard sci-fi and you’re looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.

You’re talking about an e-liquid tank full of distillate, kind of like this, right?

If you just filled it, you should just have to let it sit for a while - I left mine overnight before I hit it to let the distillate soak into the coils.

If it worked for a while before dying, though, then the atomizer might have burned out. You can replace it, but you’ll have to empty and refill the tank, so it might be easiest to just empty it into a spare tank and use that one for a while.

it’s like building stuff with Legos.

I got Minecraft when it was still in beta, for exactly that reason. I was in college, I had some free time, and I liked messing around with the demo - it reminded me of all of the fun I had playing with Legos as a kid. I think it cost me maybe $15?

Now, a decade later, I still play it fairly often, and given all of the content that’s come out since then, it might be the most worthwhile $15 I’ve ever spent.

It’s pretty easy to break water down, but it’s also super easy to make it - just burn anything organic.

Usually you can’t see the water being formed, but there’s actually a really common example: car exhausts on a cold day. If you notice a bit of water dripping out of the tailpipe of the car in front of you at a red light, that’s actually the moisture in the exhaust fumes condensing on the cold tailpipe.

I would assume it’s distillate if you can see through it, but… Why does it glow? I’ve never put concentrates under a blacklight, but that seems kind of questionable.

Honestly, it’s kind of like wine: the more kinds you try, the more you start to pick out the differences; and you can learn a lot about them without any sort of formal education.

An easy way to do that is by starting a weed journal. When you pick up flower, write down the strain(s) that you got, and then when you smoke it, write down stuff like how it smells/tastes, or how it made you feel. Before too long, you’ll start to be able to pick out things that you liked (for instance, lemon and pine scents, giggly and calm effects) and things that you didn’t like (skunky smell, sort of a racy feeling, too sedative, etc.) about different strains.

And, really, don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work or takes a long time. When I picked up from a friend, I really couldn’t tell the difference between most of what they had; and when I picked up from a sketchy gray-market delivery service, there was more of a difference, but still nothing super substantial. It wasn’t until I’d been shopping at a dispensary for like six months that I realized that even though I “just liked weed,” I did actually have a preference for sativa-leaning hybrids with a fresh pine scent.

Yes and no.

Your THC is always degrading into other minor cannabinoids, but it happens very slowly at room temperature. Heating it up will speed that reaction up, though not by a ton until it gets pretty dang hot (this is why bud that’s already been vaped tends to be very heavy in CBN). A week in a hot car probably didn’t do wonders for your preroll, but depending on where it was (direct sunlight or shade, in the glove box or on the floor, etc), the amount of actual heat that the preroll was exposed to could vary quite a bit (my center console stays weirdly cool, for instance, but the glovebox gets very hot), so I can’t say for sure if being left in the car degraded the THC.

That said, terpenes are quite volatile, and tend to influence the entourage effect of the weed, so you also could have lost enough terps to potentially dull some of the week’s expected effects as well.

You nailed just about everything that I’ve been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it’s definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren’t any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

…Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.