What drives me crazy about the use of water for datacenters is that it isn’t necessary. Unlike growing crops where the water is a non-negotiable requirement of the endeavor just by its very nature, you can cool a datacentre without continuously consuming water.

It just so happens that by a completely insane series of circumstances it’s the cheapest way to do so. You could run the servers in the datacenters at a lower power limit. You could use non-evaporative cooling. You could build the datacentre in a colder or less arid climate. But no, all of those options either cost slightly more or generate slightly less money, so they aren’t even considered. Couple that with the fact that a significant proportion of that consumption is in service of prompts that no end user ever actively asked for, like the LLMs responses being generated many thousands of times per second by Google searches. It’s just this utterly pointless pissing away of resources.

Reads an article about people falling for the doorman fallacy, immediately falls for the doorman fallacy.

I don’t believe you.

There’s another alternative, which is manually adding libraries to your project yourself instead of doing it all automatically through a package manager.

Yes, it’s less convenient to download and import a package manually, especially if you need to do the same with a litany of dependencies, but I don’t feel like that’s a bad thing. Raising the barrier of entry for arbitrarily adding thousands of lines of other people’s code to your project would force people to think about how much of that they actually need.

It’s impossible for an ISP to guarantee speeds though, because it’s not just their connection that’s being used.

Do they use this to weasel out of reasonable expectations of connection quality? Yes, absolutely. But they also can’t do anything about the speed of the server you’re downloading from.

It’s literally how their wealth is calculated, but okay. Even if I’m incorrect and it’s not already the case they can easily dodge such a tax by buying a bunch of non-liquid assets and making it the case.

Billionaires aren’t sitting on billions in currency held in banking accounts. They are holding billions in assets which are valued at those numbers. You couldn’t just take all of Bezo’s “wealth” above $1b without liquidating most of Amazon.

Not that I disagree with you in principle, it’s just not as simple as your proposed solution requires.

They have fairly reasonable guides on their site on how to host for others.

https://foundryvtt.com/kb/

Depends on what part of “set up” you’re referring to. Getting the software itself up and running is extremely easy. They have versions available for the full swathe of experience levels from “here is a packaged Electron based Windows application” to “here are the node.js source files”. All prior versions are also available if you have specific needs for an earlier version.

Now, if you mean how difficult is it to set up and run a game, that’s going to vary wildly depending on the system the game uses and how complex of a scenario whoever is running the game wants to deal with. There are lots of off-the-shelf one shots or campaigns you can run where that setup is already done for you though.

Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.

FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.

Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.

I’m one of those deranged few who actually used em dashes in my normal typing habits. Not super often the way LLMs are prone to, maybe once a month tops. Alt+0151 or Compose, dash, dash, dash.

Now a find myself reluctant to use what I felt was a useful bit of punctuation out of concern people might think what I’m typing was LLM generated. It sucks.

Eh, no skin off my back. Pretty sure if you search my comment history for the word “grok” this comment chain is the only time I’ve ever used it. It’s not a regular part of my speech, I just never interpreted it in the way you were saying.

or you have such trouble being understood, or understanding neurotypical people, you think you need a new word.

My background pretty heavily leans toward comp-sci and hacker culture, and “grok” in those circles is almost never used in the context of people, so I find it a bit odd that this is what you seem to be focusing on. It had very little to do with the difficulty of understanding other people, and much more to do with the understanding of a language, or nuanced hardware interactions, or programming techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok#In_computer_programmer_culture

For what it’s worth, I agree on your specifics, and if someone is frequently making statements about being unable to grok others, or others not being able to grok them, than it’s at the very least off-putting.

It’s a useful word with no direct equivalent in English. You don’t need to integrate the cult aspect of the book into your identity to understand that.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Copied over from where to what? The Frame is the only ARM device in the lineup. The Steam Machine is x86.

Holy cow. This is possibly the best description of how I usually think I’ve ever encountered. It was actually a bit unnerving to read. Though I’ve always conceptualized it as “shapes” and “holes” rather than vectors.

The ability to near-instantly make connections between symptoms and cause for any given issue in a system I’m familiar with especially resonated. The best explanation I could give someone without stepping back and basically re-solving the whole thing from a standing start would be “the shapes fit together”.

It feels like I’m being asked how I knew a puzzle piece fit in a space, and for some reason “I looked at it and could see that it fit” is not a sufficient explanation. No, I didn’t need to investigate other possible pieces. They are obviously different shapes. The one that you’re asking about doesn’t even belong to the same puzzle.

Similarly I am also utterly incapable of describing what a person looks like in any detail. I have a “mind’s eye” and can conjure up images of them in my head, but for whatever reason I just completely lack the ability to express what I see in words outside of very high level details. They have brown hair, they’re tall, what do you mean “what shape is their face?” Sara’s face is the shape of Sara’s face. It couldn’t be any other shape.

I do have an internal monologue or voice though, but it’s not constant. It usually only comes up when I’m dealing with other people and need to try to reason through what someone else is doing.

I feel the need to ask about the choice of “loud” as the adjective here. Are the tags actually making audible noise, or is this just a non-standard usage of it an a synonym for “overwhelming”?

I never understood why Sony felt the need to flip confirm/cancel in markets outside Japan.

My nephew has talked about how lucky some of his friends are because they get more robux from their parents than he does and how he wishes his parents would give him more “nice things” like that.

This is a kid who has been to disneyland multiple times and has gone on multiple cruises before he was a decade old. They have a big trip basically every summer, but he doesn’t want any of that, he just wants more robux.

Gamer uncle of kids with non-gamer parents here.

I did what I could.

My niece’s taste in games is impeccable. She’s 13 and among her favorites are Hollow Knight, the Ori games, Inscryption, Cult of the Lamb, and of course big mass kids appeal games like Pokemon and Mario.

My nephew (9) is a lost cause. It’s all Roblox and mobile child casino garbage and he doesn’t have even the slightest interest in anything else. I’m pretty sure my partner and I are the only people in his life who have never given him Robux.