jamescrowley

Or getting mad at oil & gas companies? They’re only supplying the fossil drugs we demand. And using their billions in profits to lobby at every level of government and society to ensure they can continue despite the scientific evidence of harm that they’ve known since the 70s? Not at all like that.

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/big-tech-data-centre...

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-choose-ai-climate-goa...

Quite a few countries (France, Spain, Italy for starters) require seat reservations in advance for any long-distance/high-speed trains now. And worse, they have a quota for passes, so even if the train has space, you might not be able to reserve a seat and therefore get on the train. A real shame as it makes it far less flexible than before.

The EFI partition is unencrypted.

“you don't even need to plug an external storage device, you can just pull out the disk, copy the files in the EFI partition, put it back and it will still work. That's how bad it is.”

3GW/9GW is peak load, as I understand it - data centres usually operate at 85-90% of peak load according to Goldman Sachs.

Meanwhile, the 4GW figure is average demand - Utah consumed 35,075GWh for 2025, so average demand of 4GW (35075/(365*24)).

‘More power than an entire state’. Yep - take the Stratos data center project in Utah, the first phase of which is expected to consume 3GW and at full capacity is expected to be 9GW. By comparison, the entire state of Utah currently uses about 4GW.

Estimates suggest they could save U.S. consumers billions of dollars a year in electricity costs, while potentially offsetting thousands of megawatts of demand (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...)

Plus it increases equity because this primarily opens up solar for those in rented accommodation and apartments/flats who otherwise couldn't access it. Personally that feels well worth pursuing if it's deemed safe.

My understanding is that is why they are limiting to 800w (~4A) at least in the UK's BS 7671 Amendment, which they consider well within the designed safety margins.

Unfortunately most people's actual usage patterns for plug-in hybrids appear to make them worse than just a straight up ICE - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...

How exactly? Meta isn’t doing this out of generosity to society. They’ll be consuming this and vastly more energy to ultimately increase their own profits?

You actually don’t need (long-lived / hard-coded) secrets in this scenario if you use OIDC:

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/secure-your-work/...

I wonder if this works more reliably than airdropping between my iPhone and MacBook… which seems to be 50% success rate at best.

Until recently, the geographical locations where geothermal is feasible and economic was very limited. Ironically it is tech from fracking/shale gas that is starting to open up a far wider range of possible sites at lower cost.

which is why dispatchable power is required - not coal?

Nothing to do with the blackout in Spain - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-... - voltage surge and various thermal power generators failing to provide the voltage correction services they were being paid for

But yes, grid following alone does not provided the required stability - synthetic inertia etc needed

Baseload is traditionally about generation, not consumption. And baseload generation only makes sense when it is the cheapest option.

When solar and wind produce at near-zero marginal cost, running inflexible baseload beside them just forces cheaper generation to switch off, driving up system costs.

What the grid needs is dispatchable capacity - batteries, hydro, gas peakers (if we must) and demand shifting - that can plug the gaps when cheaper forms of generation cannot.

I had a similar experience and backed away from using it - non-spam emails were getting spam filtered without visibility or notification.

Assuming those don’t become illegal - Australian authorities are looking to ban face masks at protests- https://www.hrlc.org.au/explainers/human-rights-briefing-vic...

The investigation has shown it was in fact nothing to do with renewable energy sources despite the noise made at the time - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-...

you also appear to get efficiency gains as vertical panels don’t get as hot - https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/10/researchers-shed-ligh...

Iceland, Japan and Norway are the culprits still supporting whaling, not China - just fyi :)

Discussion and video link here for anyone else interested: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...

And lightly edited transcript here: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...

In case you are not aware, there is tooling to help with GitLab to GitHub actions migration, but I have not tested on anything complex so YMMV

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/migrating-to-github-actio...

Yep!

Unfortunately, quite possibly. Bio-based plastics are not necessarily any more biodegradable than their fossil fuel based counterparts.

Most solar arrays that are built still feed into the general electricity grid, as I understand it. So while the PPA has likely enabled the construction of the solar, you'd still need to consider the overall carbon intensity of the grid at the time of energy consumption - and hence the SCI incentivising direct reductions by making software carbon aware, and encouraging higher efficiency.

If the data centre entirely off-grid, the SCI permits using your own grid intensity factors.

I'm not clear on the scenario where the solar is directly connected to the data centre 'behind the meter', or if there are other forms of peak shaving, while still drawing on the grid when needed - does anyone else care to comment/clarify the standards intentions there in terms of incentives?

Why do we need such a thing?

For starters, growing numbers of companies are required to report on their own emissions, which includes software - and therefore having agreed standards on how to measure this would seem a good way forward to me?

carbon emissions are also proportional to energy

Reducing energy usage reduces carbon emissions, but they are not proportional. Highly dependent on the grid composition, time of day you draw the energy, and any behind-the-meter infrastructure.

and all large operators do catalog and reduce GHG emissions.

To take AWS as an example, they still do not report scope 3 emissions for customers (due 'early 2024') - without which, these 'catalogued' numbers are essentially meaningless given how understated they are.

on the chart in the article is “each month compared to the 20th century average of 12.2°C”, so that’s the zero line in this instance

I thought it worth mentioning that a startup called UNDO (https://un-do.com/) is already doing this - and have designed a carbon credit methodology with Puro.earth (https://puro.earth/accelerate/undo-enhanced-rock-weathering-...)

The crushed basalt they use is already a byproduct from quarries they partner with from what I understand.

It can actually have benefits to the soil as a fertiliser - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10011191/

Some of you might be interested in https://leadelimination.org/. Currently 100+ countries have no lead paint legislation. LEEP work to ensure effective policies and eliminate lead poisoning globally.

(I have no affiliation beyond having chosen to donate)