spit_evil_olive_tips
@spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org
- Comment on UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought 5 days ago:
I’ve always called it “getting mail-blasted on the information superhighway” but not many dictionaries include this alternative usage, and Merriam-Webster filed for a restraining order against me.
- Comment on This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery 1 week ago:
yeah, the scalability of this seems like a pretty big challenge
annoyingly, they talk about the amount of water they pumped only in terms of energy (35MWh) and not in terms of water volume.
I think they do that because, if you estimate the water volume…it’s pretty unimpressive.
going off the numbers for Bath County Pumped Storage Station, the largest in the US, and until 2021 the largest in the world:
total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh - meaning that this power station built in the late 70s / early 80s has almost 700 times the storage capacity of this 35MWh demo
between their upper reservoir and lower reservoir, their water capacity is 78.4 million cubic meters. so as a crude estimate, Quidnet’s demo project used ~115,000 cubic meters.
Olympic swimming pool contains 2.500 cubic meters. so, again with the caveat that this is a rough estimate because Quidnet didn’t publish the actual numbers…this demo they’re bragging about involved 45 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.
- Comment on This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery 1 week ago:
yep, 100%
that’s even one of their main selling points:
And Quidnet’s approach, which uses commercially available equipment…
this seems to fall into the bucket of “fossil fuel industry looking for ways to diversify and still make profits even as fossil fuel usage declines”
also notable is that fracking for oil is typically a one-time (or at least time-limited) thing. you do it to some rock formation, extract the oil or natural gas from it, and then move on to another formation.
what they’re pursuing here seems to be repeated fracking, pumping water in and back out over and over again. this article about Racoon Mountain in TN for example, mentions a daily pumping cycle - fill up the reservoir using excess nuclear power at night, then drain it during the day.
they’re claiming success based on pumping in water, sealing it up for 6 months, then pumping it back out again. that’s very different from pumping water in and out of this “impermeable” rock every 24 hours, for years or decades (Racoon Mountain was built in the 1970s)
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 2 weeks ago:
So much for dissing on AIs for not being able to count.
no, I’m still going to do that.
- Comment on AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers 2 weeks ago:
yeah, that sure makes it infeasible 👀
uh-huh. do you have the source data for that infographic?
it’s a bit hard to read because it’s ridiculously low-res (almost a full quarter of a megapixel), but I can at least make out the caption, which says “European cities with district heating systems (population)”
from that alone I suspect it’s a bit misleading - it’s ambiguous whether the population they’re highlighting is the population of the city total, or the population served by the district heating system.
eg, if there’s a city with 100k population, and a college campus in that city that serves 1000 students with district heating, does that show up on the map as a dot representing 1k population? or 100k?
as I said, this depends heavily on high population density. I don’t doubt that it can work in European cities, or on American college campuses (because those tend to be some of the few places in the US that have population density approaching a European city, as well as the political tolerance for that sort of centrally managed infrastructure)
but the OP I replied to was talking about trying to do district heating in suburban / exurban Texas. I don’t know if you’re from the US, or if you’ve ever been to Texas. if you haven’t, you probably don’t understand the sheer scale of the sprawl we’re talking about here. go pick one of the cities on that infographic, look up its population density (in people per square km), and compare it to the population density of suburbs in Dallas / Fort Worth. if they’re even within an order of magnitude of each other, I’ll give you a cookie.
- Comment on AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers 2 weeks ago:
could we not use the data center as water heaters and distribute the hot water to households?
is that technically possible? sure. it’s called district heating. that wikipedia article mentions examples of it being used in the Roman empire, 14th century France, the 19th century US Naval Academy, and early 20th century MIT campus.
in practice…houses already have a “regular” water connection running to them. in order for this to be practical, you’re talking about having to run plumbing for a 2nd hot water connection. to every house.
come up with an estimate for how much you think that would cost. then go look up the actual cost that Flint spent on replacing their primary water connection pipes. then go look at your estimate again.
when it’s feasible, usually you see it on a college campus, or somewhere else with high population density and a centrally-located physical plant providing the hot water / steam.
we’re talking about data centers in Texas here. they’re probably in some warehouse district in exurban sprawl, and the homes you’d theoretically want to run the pipes to would all be detached single-family homes in suburbs miles away. hope your pipes are well-insulated.
- Comment on SCOOP: Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog 2 weeks ago:
on one hand, if you’ve been following news about Substack at all, this is not particularly surprising:
November 2023: Substack has a Nazi problem
January 2024: Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis
but on the other hand…this is the kind of thing that will be surprising to a lot of people who aren’t savvy media consumers. if they thought about Substack at all they probably thought of it as just “that website with all the newsletters”.
many of those people had the Substack app installed on their phones.
they got a push notification. the icon of the push notification was a swastika.
imagine looking at the list of notifications on your phone and just…seeing a whole-ass swastika.
I would compare this to the time Elon Musk called that cave diver in Thailand a “pedo guy”. he was a shitbag before that, he was a shitbag after that, but that was still a watershed moment when a lot of people had the sudden realization of “oh, huh, this guy’s a shitbag”.
Substack has been a Nazi bar for a few years now. they started allowing customers of the bar to hang up flags on the front patio. today was the day they hung up a Nazi flag.
- Comment on AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers 2 weeks ago:
According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle
…
According to the Chronicle article
…
“Once that water evaporates, it’s just gone,” Mace told The Austin Chronicle.
one of my journalism pet peeves - they don’t link to that original source article, from only 4 days ago, but this entire article is basically just a rewrite / rewording of it. all of the sources quoted are from the Austin Chronicle, they don’t seem to have done any original reporting.
and on the sidebar, the top link on “Editor’s Picks” is “10 Most Successful Shark Tank Products” which is pretty obviously just an ad disguised as an article. so this “Techie Gamers” website seems like a pretty shitty clickbait farm.
- Comment on UK Users Need to Post Selfie or Photo ID to View Reddit's r/IsraelCrimes, r/UkraineWarFootage 2 weeks ago:
a lot of the discussion about “require age verification to view adult content” tends to oversimplify “adult content == pornography”
which in turn means opposition to these laws gets dismissed / trivialized as “oh, so you want children to look at porn then?”
I think it’s an important reminder that “adult content” is much broader than 13 year olds who want to go to PornHub and search “boobies”
- Comment on Ex-Google CEO: Power Grid Crisis Could Kill AI's Next Big Leap 4 weeks ago:
remember the William Gibson quote “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”
that applies to the negative affects of the future, not just the positive ones
Musk’s MechaHitler chatbot is powered by methane-gas burning turbines
It’s been known that xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has been using around 15 portable generators to help power its massive supercomputer in Memphis without yet securing permits. But new aerial images obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center show that number is now far higher. The group says these gas turbines combined can generate around 420MW of electricity, enough to power an entire city.
I’m old enough to remember when my techno-optimist friends were talking about how “you may not like Elon Musk, but you have to give him credit for helping solve climate change”
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
the sources quoted/linked in the article:
Maarten Sap told CNN.
When CNN tested three popular AI chatbots
CNN asked each chatbot
KhudaBukhsh told CNN.
Cameron Berg and Judd Rosenblatt from AE Studio wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, told CNN
it seems pretty clear that this “news” site is just summarizing articles from more reputable outlets so they can get their own ad revenue from them.
and the cherry on top:
After the controversy, Musk acknowledged the problem on his social media platform X.
with a link to...https://x.com. not to any one particular tweet. just a link to the website.
I had suspicions that this was AI-generated slop, but that proves it in my mind. no human journalist would embed a link like that.
- Comment on I have about 55 hours of flights coming up. I’m thinking about the deus ex collection. Any thoughts? 1 month ago:
at the risk of being “guy who pretty much only plays Factorio recommends you play Factorio…”
you can easily put 50+ hours into a single savefile, especially with the Space Age expansion
- Comment on AI Leaves Digital Fingerprints in 13.5% of Scientific Papers 1 month ago:
direct link to the paper, rather than this Gazeon clickbait: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813
We study vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, reaching 40% for some subcorpora.
- Comment on AI Job Fears Hit Peak Hype While Reality Lags Behind 1 month ago:
99% of users on Lemmy instances are extremely fearful of AI and lack the courage to accept reality
hi. I see you registered your account here 2 days ago. welcome to Beehaw.
posting comments that boil down to “99% of you are stupid but luckily I’m here to educate you” is probably going to wear out your welcome pretty fast.
- Comment on Trump Team Has Full Meltdown Over CNN Story on ICE-Tracking App 1 month ago:
haha Streisand Effect go brrrrr
apps.apple.com/us/app/iceblock/id6741939020
(currently no Android version, unfortunately)
- Comment on My AI therapist got me through dark times 2 months ago:
With NHS mental health waitlists at record highs, are chatbots a possible solution?
taking Betteridge’s Law one step further - not only is the answer “no”, the fucking article itself explains why the answer is no:
People around the world have shared their private thoughts and experiences with AI chatbots, even though they are widely acknowledged as inferior to seeking professional advice.
as with so many other things, “maybe AI can fix it?” is being used as a catch-all for every systemic problem in society:
In April 2024 alone, nearly 426,000 mental health referrals were made in England - a rise of 40% in five years. An estimated one million people are also waiting to access mental health services, and private therapy can be prohibitively expensive.
fucking fund the National Health Service properly, in order to take care of the people who need it.
but instead, they want to continue cutting its budget, and use “oh there’s an AI chatbot that you can use that is totally just as good as talking to a human, trust us” as a way of sweeping the real-world harm caused by those budget cuts under the rug.
Nicholas has autism, anxiety, OCD, and says he has always experienced depression. He found face-to-face support dried up once he reached adulthood: “When you turn 18, it’s as if support pretty much stops, so I haven’t seen an actual human therapist in years.”
He tried to take his own life last autumn, and since then he says he has been on a NHS waitlist.
- An Uber drove away with her kid. Then Uber wouldn't connect her or police with the driver.www.cbc.ca ↗Submitted 3 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Why you should be polite to AI 4 months ago:
tl;dw is that you should say “please” as basically prompt engineering, I guess?
the theory seems to be that the chatbot will try to match your tone, so if you ask it questions in a tone like it’s an all-knowing benevolent information god, it’ll respond in kind, and if you treat it politely its responses will tend more towards politeness?
I don’t see how this solves any of the fundamental problems with asking a fancy random number generator for authoritative information, but sure, if you want to be polite to the GPUs, have at it.
like, several lawyers have been sanctioned for submitting LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations. if you tack on “pretty please, don’t make up any fake case citations or I could get disbarred” to a prompt…is that going to solve the problem?
- Comment on I don't know who needs to hear this, but DO NOT EVER expose Jellyfin to the internet 4 months ago:
short answer: no, not really
long answer, here’s an analogy that might help:
you go to
https://yourbank.comand log in with your username and password. you click the button to go to Online Bill Pay, and tell it to send ACME Plumbing $150 because they just fixed a leak under your sink.when you press “Send”, your browser does something like send a POST request to
https://yourbank.com/send-bill-paymentwith a JSON blob like{“account_id”: 1234567890, “recipient”: “ACME Plumbing”, “amount”: 150.0}(this is heavily oversimplified, no actual online bank would work like this, but it’s close enough for the analogy)and all that happens over TLS. which means it’s “secure”. but security is not an absolute, things can only be secure with a particular threat model in mind. in the case of TLS, it means that if you were doing this at a coffee shop with an open wifi connection, no one else on the coffeeshop’s wifi would be able to eavesdrop and learn your password.
(if your threat model is instead “someone at the coffeeshop looking over your shoulder while you type in your password”, no amount of TLS will save you from that)
but with the type of vulnerability Jellyfin has, someone else can simply send their own POST request to
https://yourbank.com/send-bill-paymentwith{“account_id”: 1234567890, “recipient”: “Bob’s Shady Plumbing”, “amount”: 10000.0}. and your bank account will process that as you sending $10k to Bob’s Shady Plumbing.that request is also over TLS, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s security for a different level of the stack. the vulnerability is that you are logged in as account 1234567890, so you should be allowed to send those bill payment requests. random people who aren’t logged in as you should not be able to send bill payments on behalf of account 1234567890.
- Comment on No one knows what the hell an AI agent is | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
oh, this one’s pretty easy, actually
a normal AI tells you it’s safe to eat one rock per day
an AI agent waits for you to open your mouth, and then throws a rock at your face. but it’s smart enough to only do that once a day.
Casey Newton reviewed OpenAI’s “agent” back in January
he called it “promising but frustrating”…but this is the type of shit he considers “promising”:
My most frustrating experience with Operator was my first one: trying to order groceries. “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting it to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from? What kinds of groceries do I want?
It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.
At that point, I told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store in San Francisco. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.
After a surreal exchange in which I tried to explain how to use a computer to a computer, Operator asked for help. “It seems the location is still set to Des Moines, and I wasn’t able to access the store,” it told me. “Do you have any specific suggestions or preferences for setting the location to San Francisco to find the store?”
they’re gonna revolutionize the world, it’s gonna evolve into AGI Real Soon Now…but also if you live in San Francisco and tell it to buy you groceries it’ll order them from Iowa.
- Comment on Tesla's latest decline could be one for the history books - $795 billion since Dec 17 or 53.7 percent 5 months ago:
click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, “Don’t Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success”
- Submitted 5 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 17 comments
- Comment on You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results 5 months ago:
their pricing page is here.
I’m paying 10 USD/month for their unlimited plan, there’s also a 5 USD/month tier but I’m sure that I would exceed its 300 searches/month limit.
so it’s not dirt-cheap, but not stupidly expensive either. I can afford it, and I’m happy to pay it because it’s a business model that I would like to see succeed.
- Comment on You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results 5 months ago:
I’ve been using Kagi for ~2 months, after a friend gave me a similar invite code. this news from Google affirmed my decision to pay for Kagi once the 3-month trial is over, instead of going back to Google.
- Comment on It only took a day for LA Times' new AI tool to sympathize with the KKK 5 months ago:
Tay any% speedrun
although I suppose “only one day after launch” doesn’t break the record:
It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
but it’s great that the billionaire owner of the LA Times is trying. this sort of innovation is why billionaires like him are so important.
- Submitted 5 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 7 comments
- A quarter of startups in Y Combinator's current cohort have codebases that are almost entirely AI-generatedtechcrunch.com ↗Submitted 5 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 7 comments
- Comment on Google’s Sergey Brin urges workers to the office ‘at least’ every weekday 5 months ago:
a salary that guarantees $1 million a year post-tax
to keep the mind-boggling numbers in perspective:
you’re paid $1 million/year post-tax, like you said.
and say you have no expenses to speak of - you take all your meals in the Google cafeteria, take the Google shuttle to work, and live with your parents or in some other form of housing that doesn’t cost you anything. this means you can put that entire $1 million/year into a savings account.
even in that contrived scenario, you would need to work 1000 years to accumulate one billion dollars.
at which point, you would have 1/145th of Sergey Brin’s current wealth. if you wanted to match it, you would need to work 145,000 years.
- Submitted 5 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 29 comments
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value 5 months ago:
here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value
it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant
judging by the “more top stories” on Futurism’s home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:
Trump White House Tells Elon He’s Stepped Over the Line
Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value
Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws
here is the primary source that the article is based on: www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella
there’s a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:
Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we’re going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.
right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new “breakthroughs” that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just “regular” access journalism, it’s hard to say.
around 15 minutes in, the host asks:
You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it’ll be 10x that. You’ll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate… we’re doing with all that intelligence?
Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?
and Nadella responds:
Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it’s a great question because at some level, if you’re going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft’s sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there’s only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let’s first see if, let’s say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it’s zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I’m not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker, right? So it’s not just, it can’t just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that’s the thing, right?
I think there’s a lot of people are writing about it. I’m glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.
When that happens, We’ll be fine as an industry. But that’s, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.
that word salad is a lot of things, but I don’t think it lives up to the “generating basically no value” hype that Futurism tried to give it.
also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition…which is of course for an AI product:
A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Through Scale’s data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.
As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE’s research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity’s Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems’ expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE’s data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.
did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the “SEAL team”?