>4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
Was that when Obama capitulated to Putin and permitted him to annex Crimea? Perhaps that was the "more flexibility" that he secretly promised Putin he would have after his election. I wonder what he got in return for it.
In the real world, NATO is a highly exclusive club, which is very reluctant to accept new members and extend its mutual defence clause to them. Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO after Russia had already begun violating their sovereign territory, but NATO allies caved to Russian pressure and denied membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. Russia then used this opportunity to invade them without triggering the full arsenal of NATO.
Russia is not a cornered cat, but a nuclear-armed colonial empire that has expanded through war and conquest for centuries, growing from a small city-state into the largest country in the world, exterminating countless native ethnicities in the process:
Yes it is, and Russia is increasingly being recognized by scholars as such.
This is especially visible in the war against Ukraine, which is colonial in nature. Russia has invaded another country on imperialistic justifications ("reunification of Russian lands" etc), is using domestic minorities as cannon fodder to alter the ethnic composition of Russia in favor of Russians, is committing genocide against Ukrainians to destroy them as an ethnicity, and is resettling ethnic Russians into occupied territories to permanently alter Ukraine's ethnic composition.
The whole "NATO expansion" narrative is complete bullshit when the initiative to join NATO has come from Russia's neighbors, who want to gain the protection of its mutual defense clause in the hope that this would deter Russia from invading them.
Russia has been the aggressor in this part of the world for centuries, and the rest is a reaction to that. Russia is the sole reason why Northern and Eastern Europe have militaries at all; if it weren't for Russia, they could be disbanded overnight.
Industrial cooler manufacturers and DC PR teams have their ways to greenwash the truth.
"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.
Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
Am I missing something? How data centers in US/EU evaporating water thousand of miles from Iran affect it? Does it disturb the rain cycle in Iran or something?
I am not being overly pedantic, I am merely pointing out the obvious fact that datacentres have +- 0 bearing on water problems in Iran, and even bringing them up in this conversation while ignoring corn or beef is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.
Not sure if serious... but just in case, very simply put...
DC pulls water out of local water supply.
DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time)
Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
of course not, but as far as i understand there are a few factors that are relevant for local water supplies:
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
It would have to be a lot more than that. As a rule, rain is produced by large lakes and seas, and some evaporation from tree cover. At a guess, I suppose Iran would get precipitation from the Gulf and Caspian, maybe the Mediterranean to a lesser extent, and some of their water renewal must be off snow melt.
I flew over Iran many years ago. Much of it reminded me of central Australia. Very arid and desolate, but beautiful from thousands of feet up.
My argument is not that said evaporation would make any sort of measurable improvement for Iran water situation, it is that it would not make it worse.
I agree that there are local problems with water access, but that is a local concern, not a blank "AI/Datacentres bad" as it is being pushed right now.
Something small that has been on my mind for the past decade or so -- assistant chatbot.
Basically I long wanted to plug a chatbot into my messenger of choice with all sorts of tools for quick use, of course after the emergence of LLMs it was only a matter of time before I find time for it.
As an experiment I have decided to use Claude code + opencode to develop it, and after some trial and error I am very thoroughly impressed with the results, it grew to a nearly 10k LOC in a week and it is still very much manageable, I haven't changed a single line of code manually still.
I have developed it as a "core" that imports modules with a rigid and thoroughly documented in a spec.MD file interface, and every single bit of functionality essentially acts as a different sub-app that can consume events that trigger it and handle all of the internal logic within itself, that way everything is separated nicely and totally manageable within LLM context.
It does everything from setting up and sending reminders and todo lists, helping me track car mileage and fuel consumption, getting an overview of the day ahead(sometimes if task is important even a reminder few days prior to its date), to even opening my front gate. And all of that is exposed to 'core' chat module through tool calls, so I can request anything in plain English or voice.
Also has a web-ui where I can review tasks, reminders, settings or search past conversations.
Been using it a lot, and since I'm using groq for inference, I still haven't even needed to pay a thing, since it fits within the free limits
Notetaking with ADHD is another sort of hell to be honest.
I absolutely can attest to what parent is saying, I have been developing software in Python for nearly a decade now and I still routinely look up the /basics/.
LLM's have been a complete gamechanger to me, being able to reduce the friction of "ok let me google what I need in a very roundabout way my memory spit it out" to a fast and often inline llm lookup.
Looking up documentation is normal. If not, we wouldn't have the manual pages in Unix and such an emphasis on documentation in ecosystems like Lisp, Go, Python, Perl,... We even have cheatsheets and syntax references books because it's just so easy to forget the /basics/.
I said notetaking, but it's more about building your own index. In $WORK projects, I mostly use the browser bookmarks, the ticket system, the PR description and commits to contextually note things. In personal projects, I have an org-mode file (or a basic text file) and a lot of TODO comments.
It is very hard to explain the extent of it to a person who did not experience it, really.
I have over a decade of experience, I do this stuff daily, I don't think I can write a 10 line bash/python/js script without looking up the docs at least a couple times.
I understand exactly what I need to write, but exact form eludes my brain, so this Levenshtein-distance-on-drugs machine that can parse my rambling + surrounding context into valid syntax for what I need right at that time is invaluable and I would even go as far as saying life changing.
I understand and hold high level concepts alright, I know where stuff is in my codebase, I understand how it all works down to very low levels, but the minutea of development is very hard due to how my memory works (and has always worked).
What I'm saying is that is normal. Unless you've worked everyday with the same language and a very small set of functions, you're bound to forget signature and syntax. What I'm advocating is a faster retrieval of the correct information.
You make an assumption that of the 4000 people wounded /all/ were civilians, which is odd, considering that explosive was in a device given out to Hezbollah members.
>1. We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.
Reality of the situation is that in 2025 Ukraine IS the most combat ready army in Europe, and by far.
Russian army of 2025 is not the same as it was in 2022 too. It takes over a month to transfer military equipment across Europe /even without war going on/, we are SEVERELY unprepared.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
The idiocracy is a global trend
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