yellowapple

If every American skipped a single burger per year, that'd entirely offset the combined water use of all American datacenters.

Datacenters, in other words, do not consume all that much water in the grand scheme of things. There are many, many better targets if water conservation is a genuine concern.

And at least one of those two countries is also building datacenters in droves and would have a vested interest in hindering foreign competition.

those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it

Because they're not. That's a utility billing issue. The power company can charge residential customers lower rates than it does commercial/industrial customers. If it's not doing that, then you're better off taking it up with them (or quite possibly: whichever regulatory body is hindering their ability to do that).

The UK is surrounded by a planet-spanning body of water. It has no excuse to be complaining about water shortages even if every square inch of it was a single giant datacenter.

Plenty of the people opposing datacenters are opposing them in places that already have datacenters. If there was a direct experience to be had, they would've already had it.

In my case it's way too sensitive, causing me to scroll too far every time.

It seems like they're indeed trying to sell “Orion+”, but it doesn't look like it buys you much besides bragging rights, in which case an Ardour-like business model of “source code is free but we charge for pre-built binaries” seems like it'd accomplish the same thing.

The Linux beta feels nice. Built-in ad-blocking and nested vertical tabs satisfies the two main things keeping me on Firefox (unnerfed uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs, respectively).

Some things feel like obvious oversights, like the lack of “Search for...” when right-clicking on selected text. Also some of the settings pages are broken (like the one with per-site settings), though I assume this is just a quirk of it being a test build.

The only showstopper is the lack of publicly-available source code. Transparency is a dependency of trust. As much as I want to trust Kagi's browser (I certainly have trusted them enough to be paying them every month for their search engine + AI), web browsers are the biggest attack surface on a modern desktop, and I'd be a lot more comfortable with my daily browsing being done with a user agent that has nothing to hide. I don't even necessarily need it to be FOSS (though that'd be preferable); source-available would be enough.

Huh. Are we using different versions, then? I'm using the one on addons.mozilla.org.

EDIT: I'm now seeing some numbers by usernames; I think that's just how many times you've upvoted that user's posts/comments, not the total upvotes on that particular comment.

I just installed that extension and it doesn't show the actual number of votes.

This just sounds like an excuse to complain about things without wanting to actually do anything about them.

Why do we need sites at all? Let's just all use Usenet.

Much like how I'd be reserving a Slate right now if 4WD was an option, I'd be reserving an REO right now if electric was an option. Kinda frustrating how this new slate (pun half-intended) of non-behemoth pickup trucks manages to be devoid of an option that's all of affordable, reasonably-sized, 4WD, and electric.

Gas vehicles suffer from that range reduction, too, as my brother-in-law learned the hard way last weekend during a road trip we took to Idaho and back (wherein he was towing a camper-trailer).

nobody uses “sign in with google” for mission critical stuff

There are lots of organizations out there, even multi-billion-dollar ones, using Google Workspaces.

and designed it around their index as the primary means of accessing anything on the web

Except that you don't have to use an ATproto relay (the “index” equivalent here) to access anything on ATproto; there's nothing stopping you from grabbing records directly from anyone's PDS. You'd just need some way to know which PDS to consult; that's normally the relay's job, but it doesn't have to be (nor does the relay necessarily need to snarf every record from every PDS if you know you only care about a subset of that info).

A USB-C successor (USB-D?) that's USB-A sized but with the added pins, reversibility, and bidirectionality of USB-C would be neat. But USB-C is “good enough” as a one-standard-to-rule-them-all that I don't think it'd be worth it unless there was a massive benefit (faster data transfer? beefier power lines? optical data lines?).

I might need to power a lot of things simultaneously. I currently travel with a 6-port USB-C power adapter; while it doesn't blast max wattage over every single port (nor do I need it to quite yet), I'd be unsurprised if one that does eventually hits the market, at which point I'd be inclined to upgrade.

In any case, even for single-device power supplies, pretty much all of the 165W+ ones I have are grounded (either C5 or C13). This includes the one that came with my Framework 16 (which is my backup charger if I need to pack extra light or otherwise don't want/need that 6-port squid).

It’s important that the charger accepts an IEC C7 cable. This is an international standard, so you’ll be able to find local mains cables at office supply stores or borrow them from nearby appliances, and it’s a two-pin design. Having a two-pin mains lead means you don’t have to worry about finding three-pin (earthed) power outlets in areas where they are not yet universal. It also means that an ultra-compact travel adapter like the Road Warrior can serve as a backup option if you don’t have a local cable.

An earthed-to-unearthed adapter (preferably with some alternate path to ground) seems like a better solution there than restricting oneself to C7 and its 2.5A max current. And when the ground prong is available in the outlet, it's often a useful mitigation against the looseness of worn-out sockets (since it adds another area of support).

Macs probably would've been a reasonable choice for all the administrative/office tasks (emails, spreadsheets, presentations, all that jazz), leaving the heavy lifting to the IRIX boxen. Probably would've also been the typical first choice for GUI-driven applications (like NedryLand).

But I wasn't quite alive yet in 1991 (let alone administering IT deployments for biolabs and theme parks colocated on remote tropical islands), so what do I know lmao

I would expect within the same order of magnitude. Worst-case, skipping a burger once a month instead of once a year is hardly some insurmountable sacrifice (and I say that as a fatass who loves himself a good burger).

But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating.

Why, when that's such a minuscule amount of water in the grand scheme of things? Why focus our energy there? Why not spend that energy on the myriad many-orders-of-magnitude-worse offenders?

Here in Reno the anti-datacenter crowd has been extending that tolerance to the local casinos and golf courses (of both of which there are many more than we arguably need). If the choice is between running servers to keep the Internet going v. letting poor schmucks get swindled out of their money on the slots, I'm picking the servers over the slots any day.

Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

To drive this point home: if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year, it would entirely offset the annual water consumption of all US datacenters (including, therefore, the water footprint of AI).

Yeah, especially accessibility-related data (especially especially crosswalk info) is apparently sorely lacking in OSM, given that every time I fire up StreetComplete in a new place the vast majority of the questions are things like “Do both ends of this crosswalk have tactile paving?” or “Does this crosswalk have an island?”.

You donate money to Apple?

I could use (and have used) Körber/HighJump Advantage Architect in production, and yet that's nonetheless so far from notable that Körber's own Wikipedia page doesn't even bother to mention its acquisition of HighJump and the software products thereof, let alone the proprietary graphical programming language which HighJump's customers use to configure and customize their flagship warehouse management system.

Needless to say: production use ≠ notability, for very good reason.

Given the argument that “Odin must be notable because JangaFX uses it in production!”, it seems worthwhile to note that JangaFX itself doesn't appear to have a Wikipedia page. Maybe the case for Odin's inclusion would be stronger if someone fixed that?

The DAC is pretty impactful if it's outright incapable of outputting anything beyond the usual 48kHz :)

It's also sort of an inverted “Van Halen demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed” thing for me, too. The vast majority of my Tidal listening happens over Bluetooth, so that 24bit/192kHz FLAC stream is just gonna get downsampled to 16bit/48kHz anyway because that's all any Bluetooth speaker or headset is capable of doing — but the fact that it's an option in the first place signals that other things are being done right, too (namely: that Tidal's whole “we're the streaming service that pays artists the most per listen” premise actually has some semblance of merit rather than being complete marketing bullshit; while recording quality ain't the strongest signal possible for that, it's certainly a good sign when musicians/publishers are willing to send over the highest-bitrate lossless recordings they've got and not just the same ol' compressed-to-shit MPEG audio you can yank off YouTube for free).