Yeah, but walking anywhere only feels good if you walk in shoes made from leather you have tanned from your own cow. Why even bother walking in mass produces fast fashion tennis shoes? Anyone can tan their own hide and make some shoes. It’s much more comfortable and a better fit than store bought.

Is that really true though? Like there’s no reason I could be president except for the massive amount of connections and funding is need that effectively means it is not possible for me to be effective. (Nussbaum or Sen would say this is not about actual capability.)

I certainly think we could grow a new internet, but there is so much culture and forces pushing against this, that it may not be actually possible with addressing the systemic forces first.

Not to say we should do nothing (similar to recycling — we should do what we can as individuals, but it’s somewhat moot as long as industrial processes continue as they are now). We should do what we can and work toward a better vision.

(Edit: I think I was responding to only the first part of your comment because when I re-read it, I think I’m actually saying something similar to you)

This is a pretty good article. Something I try to stress to my students. Technology is a major driver of culture and society, and understanding that complexity of relationships is important. It’s not developed in an isolated bubble, nor is any technology neutral or value-free.

I like that the article highlights community engagement. That is so very true. Otherwise some good-intended deployment can quickly become technological colonialism when the users might not be able to do system upkeep or it solves the wrong problem

I think it might be real:

I think you’re on the right track. It’s like they heard “you can’t hold and observe an electron” and just really ran with that but missed all the actual nuance behind it. Still baffling why they would print this, seeming to point to on something like only god knows how electricity works while there’s a person using a very clearly engineered device and electric socket.

Sucks you can’t charge it and have to instead go to a central bank to exchange minted coins for notes that you can exchange for the commodity that is the radio.

We noticed this when we went to a Texas Roadhouse. Their restaurant prices for steaks hadn’t gone up hardly at all and seemed very surprisingly reasonable, whole beef at the grocer is painful.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/final-fonsi-ea-2251-rivian-stanton-springs-north-2024-12.pdf#page26

Does mention it is passed to a treatment facility, some is treated on campus, and other is stored.

So according to epa report it was not expected to affect local groundwater.

I thought I found something earlier that alluded to it, but Lemmys on my phone and doing any real research is always annoying on it. I can try to find something. I know they do release very significant amounts of wastewater though. But whether that’s all back on public utilities or how it’s but back in the ground is unclear. I’ll see I can find anything specific.

But combine that with someone dumping thousands of gallons of wastewater into the ground basically across the street and weirder things are going to happen.

EDIT: Yeah, I don’t think they are dumping water into the ground. Scratch that out. These datacenters DO use lots of water, as in millions of gallons per day, the concern there is more about how the public utilities and incentives were structured. [Quote for millions comes from Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI book, but the link was the the first data I could source, which looks less than that.]

I’m now thinking this article may be more about the person not liking the datacenter than it specifically affecting the well. Could construction cause some extra sediment to clog up the well intake? Seems likely.

Kodi and mythtv for me. I feel like I am the slowpoke meme.

I dunno, there was some pretty cool stuff going on in central/south america in the 60s. Ernest cardenal and solentiname come to mind.

Oh this touches close to him. I got into pgfplots since it would generate plots in latex at compile time and keep fonts consistent, etc. plots looked amazing though.

The worst was when a colleague couldn’t get a pdf to upload into a google doc, so he just made an ugly ass bar chart in excel for the final draft since that was easier. The only reason he could do that so quickly was because he could read the data so easily from the plot I made. Ugh. Still burns

Pointless?? Really? We should have just stuck with postscript? I’m pretty happy with pdf for almost anything as there’s a good chance it’ll render how whoever sent it to me was seeing it. What would you suggest/do different?

I teach undergrads, and every year basic computer skills get worse and worse. I guess it’s not entirely their fault, but things like just asking them to save a file to their computer is insanely difficult. Lots of universities are starting to get task forces to figure out how to teach (or where to teach rather) basic digital skills, it it’s all going to hit the workforce really soon en masse.

Im no expert either, but he did try the beer ball putsch which landed him a trial and jail time, before his actual rise to power. So his plans for a coup were definitely there.

I teach computer engineering, and Macs have gone from wonderful to the bane of labs in the last decade. Students never have the right dongle, the permissions are a mess, compilers are locked down. It’s sad actually. Macs took over cs departments and a lot of tech usage, but they seem to have entirely turned their back on that audience

I’ve only experienced it from Linux and it’s a huge exercise in pain. It sometimes works, but it’s just stacks and stacks of hacks.

All the other things I’ve used work for video conferencing have worked fine in Linux or a browser.

Ooh, and add in ever increasing journals and submissions, and you are correct!

(Or pass them along to grad students who take it extremely seriously)

The entire peer review system is somewhat of a mess since publish or perish and citation indexes have been embedded into promotion and tenure as metrics.

Nope, looks like they DeMorganed to avoid parenthesis

(Oops, didn’t realize 5 other people said the same thing! I don’t think my client loaded all the comments the first time.)